Symbols of Freedom
by Rock Scorpion
Summary: The crew are less than a week from being floating corpses. But just as the most important deal of their lives is about to go down Mal disappears and Simon is forced to take his place. Post BDM. S2:Ep1.
1. Chapter 1

**Symbols of Freedom**

**Season Two: Episode One**

Disclaimer: _This is a simple story set roughly six months after the events of the movie Serenity. We all know who created and owns the 'verse; this is just a bit of tip of the cap from me, a fan, to whomever wants to read more about the crew and their big, bad, beautiful ship. Hope you enjoy._

**Introduction**

There was only one thing Malcolm Reynolds hated more than Alliance law and that was Alliance lawyers. His current foul mood could be partly attributed to the considerable pain his busted hands were giving him, but was mostly due to his surroundings; the offices of Juniper, Ozaki and van Hansa, arbiters of law.

The offices were epic. The walls were polished limestone, subtly shadowed with the ghosts of ancient sea critters. Each tile was like a museum exhibit but probably cost more. The ceiling was a floating expanse of a reflectionless chromatic glass that somehow managed to absorb sound and make the building feel like a place of worship while simultaneously giving the air a crystalline essence. Explosive bouquets of flowers that would have cost Mal three good-months of honestly earned savings were strategically located to draw the eye to collections of art and books. There were no dead or browning flowers present. There wasn't much of anything brown here.

The office was busy in a measured and controlled manner. Sharp suited men laid comforting hands on client's shoulders and uttered quiet, reassuring words before they were led away by personal assistants, all devastating beautiful women cut from a similar, high-end, fashion mould. Secretaries sat at desks whispering into sleek headsets while older men, senior partners, still glowing from a recent workout, led new clients into boardrooms.

As soon as he and Simon had taken their seats in the waiting-foyer an assistant had brought them freshly brewed green tea. Mal's hands had been too bandaged to manipulate the intricate little pot so Simon had poured the tea for him. Mal had sipped the ridiculously hot drink as quickly as he could. It was high quality leaf. Mal could feel the searing heat of the fluid in his throat and at the same time, could feel the counterintuitive cooling effect of the herbs in his blood as it washed through him from within; forcing toxins and stress out of his skin like cold steam.

Mal sat back in a seat so comfortable he believed the animal that had provided the leather for its cushion could have been genetically engineered just to fit his ass.

Despite the effects of the tea Mal felt sick with worry and sick from barely contained contempt for all this Allianceishness going on right before his eyes. It was so clean, so sterile, and so efficient; so damned controlled and unnatural. Even the womens' beauty was clinical and premeditated, which to Mal's eye, rendered them utterly undesirable. Not that any of them, in his consideration, would have touched his brown-coated butt; not even as a bit of rough when drunk and feeling all experimental. Mal stood out against the cream and pesto interior like a turd.

He could see the way they all looked at him, the barely disguised look of contempt. Or was it pity? Either way, he wouldn't have gotten into the building let alone into the office if he wasn't accompanied by Simon. Mal stopped his internal rant and reassessed his situation. Simon wasn't accompanying him; Mal was doing the companioning here.

'Doctor Tam? Mister Ozaki will see you now.'

Simon raised his eyebrows at Mal and stood. Mal followed Simon and the secretary's mighty-fine, pin-striped, sashaying behind. They walked along a curving, floor-to-ceiling windowed corridor up to an ornate wooden door. The view across Arial's second city Uphaydron stretched for miles. The air was immaculate and from this height the thought that had gone into planning the cityscape was clearly visible. Straight line met right angle ad infinitum with a lush splashes of greenery thrown in for good effect. If any of the windows had opened out Mal would have been unable to resist the urge to take a piss.

They were shown into an office that looked like it had been designed by a particularly garish jeweler with absolutely no sense of reserve.

'Oh my.'

Even Simon was taken aback with the contrast between this room and the rest of the law firm. Mister Ozaki liked his gold and he liked his gold where everyone else could see it: in their face.

Mister Ozaki was a medium sized man with dark, receding hair slicked back on his skull. He greeted Simon with a warm smile and reached an encrusted hand across his desk to shake his hand.

'Doctor Tam. It's a pleasure to finally make your acquaintance, in the flesh.'

'Yes. Likewise.'

Simon was still taken aback by the room that regardless of the cost of its furnishings would have looked cheap in a crack-brothel. Mal looked about him and couldn't help a smile creeping over his face. He was warming to Mister Ozaki.

'And this is?' said Ozaki to Simon indicating Mal.

'Ah. This is Captain Reynolds.' There was no sign of recognition on Mister Ozaki's face. Instead he took in Mal's ensemble and pulled the slightest of faces.

Mal reached out his less-broken right hand and shook Ozaki's.

'Love the swans. Really. Incredible. Malcolm Reynolds. I'm the man selling the cargo-ship.'

'Oh yes. Of course, please forgive me.' He and Simon sat down at their respective sides of the desk. Ozaki began to move about bound legal documents.

'I have plenty for you to sign.'

Mal stayed standing.

'Yes, everything is just as you requested Doctor Tam. Here are the new company registration papers, your off-world transportation permits and papers, Alliance tax-registration papers.' He continued like that for a few minutes, reading out a new set of papers and setting them in front of Simon for his signature. Mal moved over to the door and checked the hall and then moved back into the centre of the room. He began to unwind the bindings from his gun hand.

'And finally,' said Ozaki, 'And this is for Mister… sorry, Captain Reynolds consideration and signature.' He held up two final sets of transaction documents; one copy for Simon and one for Mal.

Simon discreetly indicated for Mal to come and sit at the desk. Mal smiled back, but not politely. A micro-expression of concern registered at the corners of Simon's eyes.

'We could conclude this sale and re-registration first and then Mister… sorry, I keep doing that… Captain Reynolds could be on his way. I'm sure he is a busy man.'

Ozaki was speaking to a silent room. There was something going on here he was only now becoming aware of.

'Doctor Tam?'

Simon looked imploringly at Mal.

Mal's smile became shit-eatingly severe. He threw open his coat, drew his gun, cocked it and pointed it straight at Ozaki. The sound of Simon slapping his forehead in despair resounded throughout the room.

'Change of plan,' said Mal.

* * *

Image of man hunched in front of his computer screens. He looks unsatisfied with life. Sad music is playing.

His computer screen flashes a fault and goes black. He sighs and reaches for a can of BLUE SUN®

Suddenly the office is lit in blue light. Uplifting music featuring a children's choir plays. The man's computer comes back to life.

His work colleagues rise up and start to dance in unison.

The man is carried on this wave of enthusiasm outside of his work building. The music builds in excitement, rising to a crescendo.

The whole world is bathed in blue light and dancing.

The camera cuts to a close up of the ecstatic expression on his face as he punches his can of BLUE SUN® in the air.

Freeze image.

Show logo.

BLUE SUN®

MAKES LIFE WORTH WORKING FOR

* * *

Point Of View film of flying through space with stars rushing past.

Generic rock music heavy on the solo is playing.

[Authoritarian male voiceover]

HAVE YOU EVER WANTED TO GET HIGH?

POV rockets upwards and into a stellar nebula.

REALLY REALLY HIGH?

Perspective explodes into a firework of sizzling POVs (that will self-actualise when viewed on HD-3D multi-screen format).

A fleet of pristine cargo ships fly towards the camera in formation trailing a spectacular plume of golden plasma. They break formation and rush off-screen leaving behind only a glittering rainbow of psychedelic exhaust particles.

Superimpose an image of a pilot with a moustache wearing a flared jumpsuit and his mini-skirted exotic female flight attendant carrying a tray stacked with drinks.

GET HIGHER THAN YOU HAVE EVER BEEN BEFORE…

JOIN THE GUILDED MERCHANT SPACE FLEET.

[Second voiceover spoken very quickly]

ONLY ALLIANCE CITIZENS MAY APPLY SUPPORTED BY THE ALLIED FEDERATION OF CIVILIZED PLANETS

* * *

Take my love. Take my land.  
Take me where I cannot stand.  
I don't care, I'm still free.  
You can't take the sky from me.

Take me out to the black.  
Tell my ma' I ain't comin' back.  
Burn the land

And boil the sea.  
You can't take the sky from me.

Have no place I can be since I found Serenity.  
But you can't take the sky from me.

* * *

**Chapter One: ****The Captain**

**Two week****s earlier…**

The local sun appeared over the crescent edge of the algae-planet Crephelios like a sudden, blinding, continent-spanning inferno. Dawn rushed through the sucking vacuum of space and bathed the cockpit of the Firefly-class interplanetary cargo-ship Serenity with a pale, weak but welcome warmth.

River engaged the auto-pilot and let go of the flight-control stick. She raised her knees into her chest and wrapped her arms around her legs and closed her eyes. Serenity rolled gently downwards, to the right, following a targeting beacon.

The light irradiating the skin of her eyelids felt like the perfume of a desert flower and she smiled with pleasure. It had been a long flight without a captain and she was glad to finally be at their destination. It was her first time piloting Serenity without supervision. Now, all she wanted to do was drop off their cargo, get paid and… and… and what? Go home? Where was that? Where was home? Downstairs in the oily belly of the boat was where.

River was an itinerant with no home or ties or roots. She was just a particle, a photon, neither wave nor mass, lacking purpose or meaning. Nothing more than the result of a random chemical reaction, just being, existing and like the dawn-light, travelling through the 'verse wherever the solar winds took her.

River found herself longing for a refuge. Somewhere she was meant to be when she had nothing else to do. A home where there was weather in the sky and sand between her toes and a bed in a room in a house that was hers. A door that squeaked because she had forgotten to oil the hinges and wilting vegetables in the cooler because she had been gone too long and not gotten around to eating them before leaving. She wanted walls to paint and curtains to draw. River wanted someplace to rest up. Just for a time.

A navigation alert light illuminated and with her foot she toggled Serenity's reciprocal alert. From the shadow of the creeping dawn below a small dark spot detached itself from Crephelios'gravity-well and started to cut an elliptical arc towards them. River flashed the identifier again and waited for a response. It came through their receiver a few seconds later and River converted the signal to a data stream using an onboard processor. Numbers appeared on the monitor before her. She didn't need to compare the sequence with the record Badger had supplied, it was authentic. River had momentarily glimpsed the page as Badger had handed it to Mal but that was long enough for her to memorise it.

She uncurled herself from the seat and pulled on a pair of chunky-soled black military boots that she had kicked off what seemed like days ago. She strapped up the sides of the boots then tugged down the ends of her knee-length black leggings, pulled Kaylee's furry orange cardigan over her shoulders, tied her hair up and out of her eyes and buckled her double-holstered gun belt around her waist.

'Goin' somewhere?' Jayne grunted as he stretched in the co-pilot seat where he had been sleeping. He followed the direction of River's extended finger out the window.

'That them?' Jayne checked his watch, 'and on time too.'

'No. They are late. We got here early.'

'Well you know what they say?'

'Yes. It is the early bird that catches the worm.'

'Yeah... so. Okay. Let's go catch ourselves some worms.'

* * *

Kaylee collapsed back on her bed with a mind-blowing orgasm popping pink spots before her eyes. Simon fell panting beside her.

'Leg. Leg. Leg.'

He shifted his weight off her leg and rolled onto his back.

'Happy six-month anniversary,' he said between deep breaths.

Kaylee's smile was so bright it could have solved poverty. The two lovers lay side by side for a few more minutes saying nothing. Nothing needed to be said. Their love-making had communicated everything the other needed to know.

Simon stirred.

'I need a shower.'

'Good luck with that,' Kaylee said under her breath.

Simon stepped into the narrow cubicle set deep into the metal wall and turned the shower-dial. A dribble of tepid water escaped from the shower-head and landed on his chin.

'Is this broken?'

Kaylee plucked her panties off the floor and slid her legs into them.

'Nope, we're just out of water.'

'We're what! Isn't that serious?'

'Only if you need to drink to stay alive,' Kaylee laughed, 'there's enough in the pipes to do us a day or so. But we're so low on fuel I don't think the lack of water is going to be a problem.'

A naked Simon stepped out of the cubicle and dried his face on a towel. He couldn't help a little edge of irritation creeping into his voice.

'That's news to me.'

Kaylee shrugged as she clasped her bra.

'So now you know. Can you change anything? No. So what is the point in going about spreading bad news?'

'Because then we as mature, sentient and responsible adults could take control of our lives instead of being treated like children. And as for me not being able to change anything, how can you be sure if you don't tell me?'

Kaylee narrowed her eyes at Simon.

'Captain's orders.'

'Of course. Had to be. Keep 'em in the dark or smack their heads in; Mal's two techniques for controlling dissention amongst the ranks. Kaylee I can't believe you didn't say anything to me.'

Simon stepped over to her and put his hands on her shoulders. He knew how personally Kaylee took Serenity's woes. He was sure embarrassment had made it easier to say nothing.

'How bad is it?' he asked.

Kaylee looked down and shrugged weakly, 'Got enough fuel to make atmo but not enough left to break the pull of a'thing bigger'n a ping-pong ball.'

'Gods, so we can land but not take off again?'

'Not without a refuel.'

'What about life support?'

'Few days, a week if we don't switch on any lights.'

Simon sat down on the bed with a heavy creak. One hand came up to his chin and he stared into the distance. Kaylee completed dressing by tying the arms of her boiler suit around her waist.

'It'll be a'right. It's always a'right. The Cap'n 'll be back in no time. He'll have it sorted. You'll see.'

'Shiny,' said Simon, but this time he wasn't so sure.

Things had changed since the funerals. Mal had changed. Zoe had been the first to leave. Simon hadn't been surprised by her decision, just Mal's reaction. How had he not seen it coming? He had known Zoe longer than anyone else yet he didn't seem to have noticed that under all the military training and reserve she was broken clean in two. Fractured too completely to carry on in Serenity where all the memories of her short marriage were born. At night, while lying in Kaylee's bed, in the bunk adjoining Zoe's and Wash's, he had been able to hear the uncontrolled, wracked, raw sobs of Zoe's destroyed heart emptying its pain into a pillow too thin to fully muffles the sounds. Mal had been too busy enjoying his new, open relationship with Inara to notice. But Simon had noticed.

When Zoe had disembarked on the border-world of Huygoria, alone, Simon had been watching from the gantry in Serenity's cargo hold. She had walked away from her old life without a single goodbye or backwards glance. Her posture may have been erect and her strides purposeful but inside Simon suspected that she was nothing more than a crying little girl running away.

Mal had not taken it well, like it was a personal insult to him instead of a woman trying to hold her life together in the only way she knew how. Zoe had got a job wearing a badge in a settlement near a series of rivers and lakes that got some high profile Alliance fishing-tourists. He had spoken to her once on the cortex. She had seemed calmer, more centred. She had a house, "a small wooden shack really, with but a quarter of a roof, but a veranda and a view of the town, my town". She had laughed at that, the first time Simon had heard her laugh since Wash had been murdered. Zoe had a beautiful, rich laugh and Simon missed hearing it. She wasn't coming back. Serenity was no longer her home. Simon wished her well.

And then there was Inara. It wasn't until Zoe had left that Simon had fully realised how incomplete a human Mal was. Without Zoe's restrained sanity Mal was nothing more than a dangerous maniac. The two had complemented the other. Between them they had made a single functioning unit. But Zoe had always been the more normal of the two, the one able to hold on to a separate relationship. Simon believed that the reason that she had been able to do that was because she had let go off the war. She had made space in her psyche for life. Mal had never done that. He had never let go of being on the losing side. The war was still going on in his head. He had never made space for life; never made space for Inara. Simon was sure he had tried, in his own way. But Zoe leaving had left him open and vulnerable; exposed.

Inara was too smart a woman not to see exactly what she had been left with. The last word Simon had heard her say, scream to be exact, with black, mascara-stained tears streaming down her face as she and River had boarded her shuttle for her final flight from Serenity was damning in its brevity and precision.

'BIGOT.'

And she was gone and Mal hit the bottle. So it was fair to say that Simon didn't share Kaylee's confidence in the "Cap'n" finding a solution to their current worries anytime soon.

It was at that moment, that precise moment in time, that Simon Tam reached a conclusion. Someone had to save their home. Someone other than Malcolm Reynolds.

'Simon?' River's voice came over the intercom.

'I'm here River.'

'Simon,' she carried on as if she was in the same room and had heard her brother speak to her directly, 'they're here. They will be docking in ten minutes.'

'Thanks River. We're on our way up.'

'Hi Kaylee.'

'Hey River.'

There was the sound of River's hand covering the microphone and Jayne's rumbling voice in the background. There was a discussion and River could be heard hissing "No." and "Shut up" followed by Jayne's laughter.

'Kaylee, Jayne wishes you a good morning.'

'I'm sure he does at that,' sighed Kaylee as she began to climb her ladder.

'And that you both had a good nights rest.' More of Jayne's laughing was cut off as River terminated the com.

Simon stood, walked over and took a hold of the material at each of Kaylee's hips. He gently pulled her back down one step. He leaned through the rungs and kissed her.

'I want you to trust me Kaylee. I'm going to sort everything out.'

Kaylee just nodded; unconvinced.

* * *

Simon stood in the centre of Serenity's cargo hold with a miniature, two-chambered silver pistol in his pocket. Jayne was high up on the gantry that faced the cargo doors, lying down with his bobble hat on and Vera at his side. River was standing with her back to the wall on the steps to the side of the port. Both her guns were drawn and she had a mean looking curved blade on her hip.

'Where did you get that from?' Simon had asked her as she walked past him to take her position, 'you look like a pirate.'

'Ar, Ar, Cap'n' she had winked at him without breaking her stride. Internally, Simon had shaken his head. The more normal she became the stranger she got.

Kaylee stood at the control panel that operated Serenity's cargo doors. She looked nervous. Simon couldn't blame her, he was nervous himself. This was a Badger job and although it had not been specifically stated that the work was illegal, Badger's name carried a lot of illicit baggage with it. Mal had assured Simon that everything would be fine, "smooth as a gandered goose" had been his exact words. But Simon still felt about as nervous as said goose prior to the gandering. A lot was riding on this transaction. It had to go well or they were going to be dead in space within the week; or stranded on a planet whose principal export was lyophilised algae. Simon genuinely could not decide which fate was worse.

'They're here,' said Kaylee just as the sudden clang of the other ship making metal contact with their docking collars echoed throughout Serenity. They all moved slightly under the gentle impact.

'Seal's good,' reported Kaylee, 'starting pressurising… now! Shouldn't take but a minute.' Simon nodded and tried to get control of his right knee which had developed a ferocious tremble. He realised he wasn't just nervous, he was terrified. He touched the shape of the gun in his pocket for reassurance then looked back over his shoulder to check Jayne was still in position. The big man was casually picking his nose.

Simon was surprised that considering the severity of their fuel status Mal wasn't here doing this himself. He wondered what had been so important that Mal had had to take off prior to this transaction, by himself, to look for prospective tenants for Inara's still furnished but now unused shuttle. He wondered if perhaps it was a test, or whether their captain had just lost the plot.

'All good. Opening cargo bay doors.'

The internal doors began to slide aside and the external ramp-door began to descend.

'Okay Kaylee, good job, now back off somewhere safe.'

Kaylee scampered to the far side of one of the parked quad-carts and hunkered down a bit so that if anyone looked at her, she might not appear like she was trying to hide, but if things went wrong, then she was already half-way to the ground. Simon placed his foot on their cargo, a sealed plasticrete box about the size of a man's torso and found that it made his knee stopped shaking.

A jet of heavy, white gas under pressure escaped the pneumatics and made a lot of noise as it spread across the floor of Serenity's cargo bay. Simon found himself looking into the eyes of the other ships captain. He was shorter than Simon and dressed in a worn, brown leather flight-jacket and oil-stained pants cut off above the ankles. At one time he may have been considered handsome but years at the helm of boats that lacked adequate shielding against cosmic radiation had given him a haggard, wind-cured complexion. His eyes were sharp, his jaw unshaven and he was holding a snub-nosed automatic at gut level. Four more members of his crew streamed out of the entryway to the other ship with a variety of weapons drawn. They spread out. Kaylee hit the dirt.

Simon held his ground. He couldn't loose control of this situation because even with River in their arsenal Serenity's reduced crew looked badly outgunned. He didn't want anyone getting hurt. His heart was thumping in his chest like a racehorse's when crossing a finish line a nose in front. He held up his hands and spoke with as much calmness as he could muster.

'You here to do business or get yourselves killed?'

The captain released the safety on his gun with an oiled click.

'River?'

The gun flew out of the captain's hand and a blur somersaulted through the air above the other crews' heads and held a sword to their captain's neck before the retort of the single gunshot had fully reverberated around the cargo bay.

'Business I reckon,' said the captain.

'Excellent choice,' said Simon, 'Please put your guns down.'

There were some looks of dissent but a carefully executed nod from their captain made them comply.

'I think that will do River. Thank you.'

River sheathed the blade with a quick flick of her wrist and walked through the other crew and back to her position on the steps. She redrew her guns. Five heads followed her like prairie dogs watching an eagle.

'Do you have the money?'

'That the merchandise?'

'It is. Shall we trade?'

'Why that would be mighty fine and then perhaps you'd like to dance a line with me or one of the prettier boys on my crew?' Their captain had recovered his swagger quickly.

'Trade will suffice for now thank you.' clipped Simon taking his foot off the box.

The captain tossed him a security-locked corrugated wallet and indicated for one of his crew to get the box. Simon didn't need to check the money. The deal was all agreed prior to Mal taking it on. The price the seller was paying was set and in the wallet. All Simon had to do was take possession and keep hold of it. There were enough credits in there to get them back on their feet. A rising sense of relief was soured with a sudden twisting tension. There was still time for this to go wrong.

'Are we done then?' asked Simon.

'Unless you got something else to trade…' said the other captain.

Simon smiled, 'No, just the box will do for…'

Kaylee piped up behind him, 'What sort of trades you looking to do?'

Here it was, the moment it all went wrong. When Mal was whuppin' his shot-up ass later on he would think back to this moment and nod.

'What you looking for. We do a lot of salvaging.'

'You got parts?' asked Kaylee coming out from behind the quad-cart.

'Got some.' The captain looked over to one of his crew who wore a selection of tools around his belt.

'What you interested in?' asked their mechanic.

Jayne sauntered down from his nest keen to get in on the action.

'We don't got much,' said Kaylee, 'but we do got a whole shuttle full of a companion's finest finery. That worth anything to you?'

The mechanic looked to one of the other members of the crew, a spiky haired woman with round hips and hoops through many parts of her face.

'She die 'n any a 'em?'

'Nope. Just left 'em all behind. Won't be coming back neither.'

'We'll take a look 'n maybe a husband 'll swap sum'is junk fer 's wife's back.'

Kaylee led the couple up the stairs towards what had been Inara's shuttle.

This was beyond Simon. Seconds before the tension in the room would have induced a cardiac infarction in an elite athlete standing a hundred meters away, now they were chatting like old friends. It was moments like these that Simon felt most strongly the distance that his pure Alliance upbringing brought to his social interactions. He would never understand the shorthand, the mindset, the flexibility of being able to fight for your life one second and make friends with the same people the next. He had never experienced the honest reality of having to be prepared to do whatever it took to survive that growing up off-core instilled in its citizens, nor the camaraderie that was shared when you encountered people who lived the same life. Simon would always be an outsider; though perhaps not both the Tams.

One of the crew, a tall black man with powerful arms and a shaven head approached River.

'I don't have anything to trade,' she said looking awkward.

The man looked her up and down, 'I wouldn't be so sure about that darlin'.'

What River did next shocked Simon to the core.

She smiled.

Coyly.

'So, want to take a walk on our ship?'

'Maybe I do,' said River who descended the stairs and with a pirouette drew close to the man, 'just not with a _piq du shi-ou_ like you.'

Jayne and a ginger haired crewman who had both been listening intently to this exchange laughed.

'Cock-block.' said Jayne and they high-fived.

River walked away across the cargo hold holstering her guns as she went. The man shook his head and smiled; he had enough class to know when he had been outclassed.

'Maybe next time then darlin'?' he called out.

'Maybe,' said River from the doorway above the med-room, 'and my name is River.' She flashed him a smile and was gone.

The man turned back to his crew mates with an enormous grin plastered across his face, 'Her name's River.' He placed one hand over his heart and walked back on board his ship with a laughing Jayne slapping him on the back.

'So what have you got to trade then?' said the ginger haired man to Jayne.

'I got guns, ammo, grenades, knives, porn…'

Their voices began to decrease in volume as they walked further away.

'That's one nice hat you…'

Simon heard Jayne cut him off mid-sentence.

'It ain't fer sale. Final.'

The captain and Simon were left in the cargo bay alone.

'That went well,' said Simon.

The captain nodded. He walked into Serenity a few paces and looked about him.

'Something about this ship… Just can't put my finger on it… Got the terrible feeling I been here before.'

'There's lots of Fireflys in the system.'

'No there ain't. No there really ain't. Takes a Hell of an intuitive mechanic to keep one of these birds in the air and they're about as rare as a good woman.'

Simon considered the double-barrelled truth of that statement.

'My name's Simon Tam,' he said extending his hand.

'Bon Saint-Chance. Pleasure 's all mine.'

'So sir, I'm not sure how one usually goes about these things but, to speak plainly, I may have a business proposal for you and your crew.'

Saint-Chance rasped the stubble on his chin for a second before speaking.

'One usually starts by pouring one a brew.'

* * *

River's voice came over the com, 'The Captain is back.'

Simon was lying on Kaylee's bed working on his slab. He finished off what he was doing, saved the document and replaced the stylus in its slot. He closed its cover with a slap just as the sound of Kaylee's boots running from the engine room to the living area came down to him. He picked up the wallet from the top of one of Kaylee's cabinets where he had put it half a day earlier and climbed the steps out of the bunk. He walked into the living area to find that he was the last to greet Mal.

River was sitting on the steps to the cockpit with a pair of bulbous pilot's goggles on her head. She was smiling at the activity. Mal was in the centre of it. Kaylee had him in a big hug and Jayne was relating some story from the other ship. Mal was laughing. His laughter faded as Simon entered the room. He had that effect it seemed.

'Doctor, all go well?'

'Yes. I think so. All in one piece.'

'Get paid?'

Simon showed the wallet to him and Mal indicated that he throw it over. Simon did so. Mal caught it and sat down at the table.

'Right here is the end to all our woes,' he said, 'we'll get our boat refuelled, get ourselves refuelled, take a leisurely spin to Kindralla, soak up some of their summer sun and open our doors to some paying passengers.'

'So there weren't any takers on the zinc mine?' ventured Simon. If Mal heard him he didn't acknowledge the question. He entered the security code Badger had given him and the top of the wallet eased itself up. He flipped its lid and emptied its contents out onto the table-top. A single, solitary credit fell from within its padded interior. It clattered like a lonely domino and came to a rest Alliance logo up. There was silence in the room.

'I'm gonna find myself a new boat,' said Jayne and walked out.

Mal looked at the credit like it had just called him a mother-lover.

'Is this a joke?' he whispered, 'A prank at the captain's expense?'

No one answered. No one dared. Simon pulled up a chair and sat down feeling like the weight of the world had suddenly been transferred to his shoulders.

'I asked whether this was joke.'

'No Mal it's not a joke. We got ripped off.' Simon could not help the exasperation that crept into his voice. He knew this had all been too good to be true from the start. Transporting a single case for Badger with no risk involved. No need to even land anywhere. Just rendezvous with their connection in deep space and take the money. Nothing in life was ever that easy.

'Got something to say Doctor. Such as explaining where my money is.'

'Don't Mal. I'm serious, don't even go there. I did exactly what you instructed me to. Handed over the cargo took the wallet no trouble. Exactly what you asked.'

'Then where the Hell's my coin!' bellowed Mal.

Kaylee took a step back from the two men.

Simon shook his head.

'This is pathetic,' he said, 'I'm done with this nonsense. This messed up, broken-down, whole screwed-up abusive family thing you think you've got going on here.'

'Don't you speak bad of my crew, my ship,' hissed Mal.

'Give me a break you drunk. Where the Hell were you? You made this gorram deal and then did a runner before it was completed. We have no idea were you were but you come back here with nothing to explain yourself except the smell of Sake on your clothes. And where do you get off being so high and mighty about your precious ship? Your precious crew? Your boat is one joule from being on the scrap heap and your crew corpses. You really gave a _hung-du_ you would have been here to see everything was done right.'

Mal stood up and tried to draw his gun but it wasn't in its holster. He tried his other hip but it wasn't there either. He spun around. No one had seen River move from her seat on the steps but somehow Mal's gun was sitting in her lap. She shook her head.

'Instead of trying to murder one of your "precious" crew why don't you get Badger on the cortex and see just what the Hell has gone wrong here?'

Mal nodded, slowly, but the red-eyed glare he gave Simon was bordering on the psychotic. He marched out of the living area and down to the com-room under the cockpit. He hit buttons like they were the heads of squirting frogs in some amusement park distraction.

Simon, Kaylee and River followed him at a distance and stood in the doorway of the small room. It took a few minutes for Mal to get a solid signal through to Persephone. Eventually Badger's whiskery little scrotal face appeared on the monitor.

'Malcolm Reynolds, I've been expecting you. Did you like my little whore-box?'

'Your what?'

'Just a little business I like to conduct with people who are too eager to believe what they want to; a deal that only someone who was desperate or stupid enough to be a whore would take on.'

'You ripped us off!' snarled Mal.

'Ripped you off? No, I made complete and utter _foo joo_ out of you. I made you a deal that was too good to be true. You must have known it was a con but you still took it on. Poor Mal, how the mighty have fallen.'

'Why Badger, why the Hell you so keen to die at my hands?'

'Don't threaten me Reynolds.'

'I'm not threatening you, I'm telling you, you _kun-gesu_ piss-bird, I'm going to gut you, spill your innards over your boots and take a dump in that favoured hat of yours.'

'You can't speak to me like that.'

'Funny 'cause I just did you_ ki-ho jink-ha_.'

'Mal you're a dead man. I swear on my mother's grave. You are_ xindun_. Walking _xindun_. You're dead and you don't even know it. You and everyone else on that ship.'

Badger cut the transmission just as Mal drove his fist hard into the screen. The glass cracked but did not shatter. Blood from Mal's knuckle dripped onto the floor. Mal just stood, staring down at where Badger's face had been seconds before.

'I'm going to kill him.

Mal's voice was cracking.

'I swear. I'm going to kill Badger.'

A violent shudder ran up his body. He suddenly attacked the console with a terrible ferocity, smashing the metal edges and glass panes with his bare flesh, screaming. Not words, just sounds. Horrible sounds, like those that had echoed around the tunnels of Mister Universe's station. Sounds made by Reavers.

As quickly as it had come the rage passed.

Simon cautiously fully eased himself into the room beside Mal.

'Mal, Let me take a look at you.'

Blood was running freely from Mal's hands onto the floor. It was all over the equipment. Mal tried to shake him off but the movement lacked strength. There was no intent. There was nothing left but a malnourishment in some old clothes. Tears were streaming down Mal's face. His head began to rock and sobs escaped his chest. His body buckled and he crumpled on the floor.

'I can't go on,' he said into the air between hitched breaths. 'I just can't go on anymore. I just can't… I just can't. I just can't bear it.' Simon wondered whether Mal was even aware they were there.

'River, help me get the captain into his bunk. I don't want Jayne to see him like this. Kaylee get Serenity moving again. Give me whatever you've got left. We're taking her down. We need some solid ground beneath our feet for a time.'

'But then we'll be stranded.'

'I told you I would take care of things Kaylee and I meant it. Let River get us to the nearest thing that resembles civilisation and I'll take care of the rest.' Kaylee hesitated; she stared at Mal and her eyes began to well up in response to his pain.

'Kaylee, love, we've got him. Now get moving and don't worry, it'll be fine. I'm in charge now.'

**The end of ****'Symbols of Freedom: Chapter One'**

**If you have gotten this far then please take a second to write a review.**


	2. Chapter 2

**Symbols of Freedom**

**Season Two: Episode One**

_**Previously…**_

Kaylee - Got enough fuel to make atmo but not enough left to break the pull of a'thing bigger'n a ping-pong ball.

Simon – You here to do business or get yourselves killed?

Saint-Chance - Got the terrible feeling I been here before.

Mal - Where the Hell's my coin?

Simon – We got ripped off.

Badger - You're dead. You and everyone else on that ship.

Jayne - I'm gonna find myself a new boat

Simon - I'm in charge now

Mal - Change of plan

* * *

**Chapter Two: ****The Deal**

**Ten days lat****er…**

They had been on the algae planet Crephelios for over a week now and Mal had yet to leave his bunk. Following his breakdown Simon had kept the captain sedated for two days. It had been three further days before he had spoken, a husky 'Get Out.'

Simon had left Kaylee to nurse him. After setting the broken bones in Mal's left hand, and cleaning, stitching and bandaging all his lacerations there was little more Simon could do for him. The healing process had to progress at its own pace from here on out.

Life on board Serenity had taken on a leisurely, relaxed rhythm. River had pitched the ship down on a rock promontory a twenty minute walk from the only town for over two-hundred and fifty klicks in any direction. Crephelios was an odd little planet in any one's book; but not without its charms. Simon could think of worse places to lick their wounds.

As far as the eye could see the planet consisted of rock-pools; billions upon billions of puddles, not one larger or deeper than a swimming pool, the majority significantly smaller. All full of algae, decillions of tonnes of the photosynthetic life-form.

Initially Simon could not fathom what sort of market there could be for seaweed. A week on Crephelios had been educational. The algae had thousands of applications. It was a core component of many foods produced throughout the Alliance. It was used as fertilizer on sparsely-soiled newly terraformed worlds. Many of the species were genetically modified to produce specific chemicals in larger quantities than the plants needed to survive that could then be extracted and sold. Simon had been pleasantly surprised to find that a significant proportion of the town's population were molecular botanists.

The town did not seem to have an actual name. He had heard one person refer to it as Algaeville, but hadn't believed that they were being serious. It was built on stones piled-up into a horse-shoe shape around the base of a slight incline. Approximately three hundred people called, whatever it was really named, home. Most were itinerant, unskilled workers. They lived in dome shaped structures about as tall as a short man and made from a cloudy gel extracted from the seaweed. They would mix dried extract with water and pour it into a mould to set. Less than an hour later the solid gel could be emptied out and a new dwelling was ready to be occupied. The algae-collectors lived on the outskirts of the town; if there was not enough space for them to pitch their igeloo, then they had to make room by gathering enough stones to raise them above the level of the water. Walking into the constantly misty town was like walking through a badly blistered burn.

The town had a single main street lined in wooden, corrugated steel and prefabricated buildings. The street forked at the base of the incline. Most of what the town had to offer, which to be fair wasn't much, could be found around this stunted fork in the road. There were some retailers, a few offices, two laboratories, a tavern, a brothel, a canteen and a combined gymnasium and wash-house. The tavern sold a passable grey brew that Jayne had taken a great liking to as well as stocking a truly repellent and utterly lethal fermented algae juice called Deadweed. Simon was sure that he had seen the tavern owner using it to fill the fuel reservoirs of his lamps. He couldn't be sure though, he had already drunk a measure.

The offices and the labs belonged to the company that farmed the algae in this area; Allied Agar. At the end of the left fork there were a set of gates leading into a fenced off area where Allied Agar kept their vehicles and heavy equipment. That was where Simon had gone on their first day on Crephelios.

There was no bank to speak of so Simon had approached the director of operations. He had spun a story that essentially painted them as an irresponsible group of rich-kids who had bought a ship as a lark but not knowing what they were doing had run out of fuel and been very lucky to make it to civilisation before they had died deep in space. Calling the town civilisation had seemed to massage the director's ego. The rest had been time consuming but productive.

Simon had made a series of conference-calls on the cortex and arranged for a proportion of his personal savings to be transferred to the company's bank account. After the transferral, which took nearly a whole day to complete, the director was able to give Simon his money as hard cash, minus the cost of refuelling and a ten percent commission as well as a personal "fee" for his troubles.

The next day Kaylee and River had taken one of the quad-carts into town and collected the new fuel-cell. The two women had brought it back to the ship and installed it and then started on a complete shake down of the ship. Kaylee had taken the opportunity to strip Serenity's engines and many manifolds and filters and multitude of moving parts and service them. River had done the same to Serenity's electronics. Together they had begun conducting trials and engineering tests; checking performance and efficiency. They ran the engines hard, making a racket that could be heard as far away as the town, shouting to each other over the din along the length of Serenity's upper corridor. Jayne had taken himself into town with some of his own credits and returned two days and one night later with a keg of the grey brew over his shoulder and one eye turning black. Simon felt sure that a woman had been involved due to the smug smile that Jayne couldn't seem to completely wipe from his face.

A week had passed like that. Three times a day one of them would travel into town and buy fresh meals; a particular favourite was a soup of uncurled, baby ferns in a stock of little silver fish. It was delicious as long as you didn't make eye-contact with any of the miniscule fish. They had money, fuel, food, ground beneath their feet and no one shooting at them. River in particular seemed completely content with their current situation.

They had been on Crephelios for ten days when Simon, returning from town with their midday meal in dinky pails, pulled the quad up to Serenity's extended cargo ramp to see Mal standing barefoot in the dirt looking up into the sky.

'Hello Mal. How are you feeling?'

'Better Doctor. Much better, thank you. So, where we at?'

There were times when Simon was not sure exactly what Mal was referring to when he talked. Sometimes, and this was one of those occasions, he felt like it was a test; Mal would judge people by how they chose to interpret his questions. Did he mean, how were he and Simon? How was the ship? The crew? Or just, where were they in physical space? Simon tended to try and cover all the bases which probably explained why Mal looked concerned every time he opened his mouth.

'We're on a planet called Crephelios. They farm algae.'

'Right.'

Mal sounded unconcerned.

'Look Mal we were just going to have lunch, why don't you join us? I'll get you some shoes.'

'No! I'm liking being in touch with the earth for a bit.'

They walked inside Serenity.

'So Doctor, seems as if I lost my way for a bit there. How come Jayne didn't take the opportunity to cut our throats and steal the ship?'

Simon shrugged, 'Never seemed to come up. Any way I think he's been busy with some whoring.'

At the bottom of the steps outside the med-lab Mal stopped.

'Where'd you get the money to pay for all this Doctor?'

'It didn't come from what Badger didn't pay us if that is what you are asking Mal.' Simon started up the stairs and Mal followed.

'So you a man of means again then Doc?'

'Yes. I am. In fact I think it's time you and I had a little conversation.'

'Regarding?'

'Regarding you selling Serenity to me.'

* * *

Mal, River, Kaylee and Simon were all seated around the table in the living room when Jayne walked in with a sweat on his face and his stinking work-out towel around his shoulders. He stopped and looked at Mal.

'Where you been?' he asked.

'In my own bed,' said Mal nodding at Jayne's black eye.

Jayne chuckled, 'I'll tell you about it sometime.' He sat down without any further enquiry into Mal's disappearance.

'We eating?'

Kaylee passed him over some of the food.

'Simon has some business he wants to talk over with us,' said Mal.

'Great. Well past time we'd be getting off this slimy rock. So Doc, what's the deal?'

'The deal?' said Simon around a mouthful of food.

'The deal is that Simon wants me to sell Serenity to him.'

Three shocked faces turned to look at Simon. He tried to smile without showing any chewed food. He swallowed hard.

'Yes. That's right. I think it would be best if Mal sold Serenity to me.'

'Why? asked Kaylee, 'What's going on here? How can you afford…?'

'Alright,' Simon put down his chopsticks and wiped his mouth with his napkin, 'Let me get one thing straight from the outset; I did not steal the money from Badger. We all heard the scrote on the cortex, there was no money, and he screwed us. End of story.'

Mal was smiling.

'I believe you Doctor. Now speak your piece.'

Simon considered how best to start.

'Things have changed. Things have changed out there in the 'verse. But things have not changed in here. Not for the better anyway. We're running on fumes. After what they did on Miranda got out things changed. It might not look like it on the surface; the Alliance didn't come tumbling down but, behind the scenes things changed. The institutions remain but the people pulling the strings lost support and were replaced with others with a different philosophy. Totalitarianism was replaced with authoritarianism.'

'That significant?'

'Yes. Less terror, more insidiousness.'

'And what has this to do with you wanting to buy Serenity?' asked Kaylee. Her arms were folded across her chest and she sounded angry, or hurt or petulant; or perhaps all three. Simon couldn't tell.

'And where did you come across all that coin Doctor?'

'Mal, the Alliance patched up our hurt and let us go from Mister Universe's station, but in the electronic systems, where all business is really done, Serenity has been black-listed. We can't touch down on Alliance property without triggering an alert that'll have a cruiser down our necks in seconds.'

'I'm intimately aware of our predicament Doctor. Why else you think we ended up running _go-su_ errands for that vicious little bastard Badger?'

Simon nodded.

'I haven't been blacklisted, quite the opposite in fact. All my resources, the money from the sale of our families estate, my savings, even my wage for all the time I was breaking River out of that research facility and here with you all on Serenity, all the money I would have earned, it's all been paid to me. I don't know why, but it has. I'm registered. I can do business with the Alliance again.'

'It's a trap,' said Kaylee.

'No,' said Mal, 'it's not a trap, it's efficient. It must have cost a lot of money to train Simon in all his doctoring, then to loose such a talented piece of commodity, that must have smarted. They probably reckon that now he has River he has no argument with them anymore and they want their investment back. They're honeying the pot.'

'Yes. That's my assessment too.'

'Well that's fine, put Serenity in Simon's name on paper or what-not and then we can get back to work.'

Mal looked at Simon. He could feel what the Doctor was going to say next.

'No. I'm afraid that won't do Kaylee. I want more.'

'You want more? Simon, do you realise how sinister you sound?'

'I don't mean to sound sinister. I just mean I want more, from my life. I can do better. We all can. We can all do better than .. what was it? Running..?

'Running _go-su_ errands for that vicious little bastard Badger.'

'Exactly. We are better than this. We have done mighty things and that makes us mighty. It is time we lived up to that potential.'

'What do you suggest then Doc? That we all sit down in the cargo hold and come up with a cure for moobs?'

Simon leaned back in his chair with a wry smile creasing his face.

'Actually Jayne, you're not that far off the mark.'

'This is surreal,' said River.

Simon laughed and put a hand on his sister's shoulder.

'I've spent the past six months on the cortex; planning, organising, researching, working hard and I think I have found a very attractive business opportunity that could work out very well for us all.'

'Go on.'

'I mentioned that the Alliance had adopted more subtle political tactics.'

'Insidious you said.'

'Correct, the Alliance still wants to spread its influence out from the core worlds but they have learnt that victories aren't measured in the number of bags you fill with your enemies' bodies; the true measure of victory is making people conclude that they were wrong to resist you in the first place. The Alliance is financing, through charitable non-governmental bodies, a series of infrastructural outreach programs. Medicines are first. But medicines by themselves aren't much use without medics. And medics need equipment and clinics and surgeries and eventually hospitals. Then come schools, sanitation, power-plants; everything a society needs to operate and grow.'

'All painted in Alliance colours?'

'Right. And if all goes to plan, all shipped by Med-Express.'

'Who?'

'Med-Express. My new company. Shipped by us.'

Silence reigned at Serenity's table as the crew digested Simon's news. Eventually Mal spoke.

'So you're suggesting we be a part of that insidiousness?'

'Yes, but on our own terms and taking it for every coin we can in the process.'

'Are you serious?'

'Deadly so and I've put my money where my mouth is if you have any doubt.'

'I have no doubt as to your intent; that much is clear to me. I'm saying are you seriously asking us to join you in making money out of spreading the Alliance's influence to worlds that sacrificed their children by the thousand in a war against just such a happening?'

Mal and Simon stared at each other, physically they were separated by a body's length of wood but philosophically they appeared to be at opposite ends of the 'verse.

'Yes,' said Simon, 'That is exactly what I am saying. The war is over Mal. The Browncoats lost. The time has come to leave history in the past where it belongs. With the dead. We're alive. We have to keep living or those people died for nothing. We have to adapt and evolve. There is no other solution.'

When he spoke Mal's voice was very controlled and very quiet.

'Those who ignore history are destined to make the same mistakes.'

'I believe that to be true. I think it is an essential part of our life to learn from those who went before but I don't think that means that we're obliged to carry that knowledge around like an anvil.'

'People died…'

'I'm a Doctor Mal, I know that people die. People die all the time. Sometimes they lead honourable lives and then have massive brain clots sitting on the toilet for their family to find them coloured blue stinking of their own excrement. Sometimes their deaths mean something. But they are dead all the same and if there is one thing everyone in history has in common, it's that they are all dead and I don't believe that a single one of them would not do whatever it took to keep living if they were able to come back.'

'Even if that meant compromising the principles that they died for?'

'Life is a gift that comes with a great responsibility attached; to keep living. I reckon no one understands that better than the dead.'

Simon spoke to the whole table.

'I'm leaving Serenity no matter what Mal decides to do. I want to do this with you if you're willing. But I'm going ahead anyway. I cannot in good conscience turn down an opportunity to take control of my life; to do good on my own terms. The Alliance's desire to bring in all these new worlds is not motivated by altruism but by capitalist expansion. A capitalist economy must grow to survive, to do so it needs new consumers. Eventually these economies grow to sizes that the populations of individual planets cannot sustain but still they have to keep growing or the whole system falls apart from the centre. But at its heart the Alliance is a democracy. And those new consumers will have voices and representation and an ability to change the system from the inside if they wish. I don't see what's wrong with enabling people to take control of their own lives.'

River stood up and picked a candle from the stand at the middle of the table. She lit it and with her hand cupped around its delicate little flower walked over and placed it in front of Mal. She brushed the lobe of one of his ears with her finger. It tingled. She spoke, or at least he thought she spoke. He could hear her voice.

_It is better to light a candle than curse the dark._

She walked away. She had obviously made her decision. Mal stared at the flame. Its light glinted on his hard eyes.

Simon stood.

'There, I did as you asked, I spoke my piece. Kaylee I think we should talk.'

Kaylee looked at him like she didn't know him.

Jayne was staring at the table setting before him. He said nothing.

Simon nodded and started to walk away.

'Doctor, if I was to agree to this what would be the next part of your plan?'

'Well we obviously can't take Serenity into Alliance space so we'd dock her at the Opeth IV station and charter an inter-planetary shuttle and fly to Arial where my lawyer has drawn up all the relevant papers.'

'When?'

'I'm ready to go right this minute. This opportunity isn't going to hang around for us to pick it up at our convenience. We have to move quick. Get in first.'

'Okay,' said Mal, 'Kaylee, fire up Serenity and get us airborne, I'll plot a course for Opeth.'

'Captain…?'

'You heard me Kaylee. Your boyfriend is right. Time has come to take control of our lives and start living.'

* * *

The journey from Crephelios to Arial had been tense to begin with. Kaylee wouldn't talk to him all the way to the Opeth station, but when she had seen the shuttle Simon had chartered, specifically requested with her in mind; an Elemental Ω yacht in mirrored silver with quadruple-pinned Rogue ADX-enabled thrust-pods; her attitude towards him had mellowed. She shrieked with excitement as she looked out the view-port and saw the Elemental. It made Simon feel fit to burst with pride that he had been able to do this for her. She had spoken of her admiration for the make many times.

She was so excited. As soon as she got on board she had literally torn herself in two, one part wanting to see the engine floor, the other the bedrooms. Her word for the next two hours had been 'fancy'. Everything became fancy in her eyes. The flight to Arial had been a very pleasant affair. Simon had lots of work to complete and had a constant anxious knot in his gut about what he was doing with his life, with all their lives, but Kaylee had made every second worth being alive to experience. He was he realised, really quite madly in love with her.

He was currently sitting beside Mal in the offices of his lawyers Juniper, Ozaki and van Hansa. An assistant had brought them tea and he had had to help Mal pour his own bowl. Simon watched Mal out of the corner of his eye. He could imagine just how much he was hating being here. Simon could sympathise but not understand. This is what he wanted for himself. It was everything he aspired to. In his plans, if all went well, one day the future offices of Med-Express would look exactly like this. Except, he wasn't just dreaming; he was doing and the difference made him giddy with a combination of terror and excitement.

A secretary walked over to them.

'Doctor Tam? Mister Ozaki will see you now.'

He raised his eyebrows to Mal as if to say "Showtime" and followed the secretary to the single most awful room he had ever seen in his life. It was offensive in every way imaginable. It was as if King Midas had experienced a severe epileptic seizure in a grubby thrift store. There were swans on the floor! An entire family of gold swans swimming around a side-table. He stared at Mister Ozaki. He looked normal enough but the man had obviously got deep-seated mental issues. Simon found he had to sit down. He thought about how much trust he had put in this man and tried to calculate how much he had already paid him. Enough to buy a cygnet at the very least.

Everything had gone well until Mal had pulled out a gun and pointed it at Ozaki's head; then things had begun to go considerably less well.

'Change of plan.'

Ozaki froze with a transaction document in each of his hands. Simon wondered whether the lawyer had ever seen a gun that wasn't on a vid-screen.

'You too rich to write?' said Mal to Ozaki.

'What?'

'Do you own a pen?'

'Yes.'

'Then start writing this down, all legal like.'

Simon folded his arms and bit down on the anger that was rising in his chest.

'All right Mal,' he said, 'You have the floor. What's on your mind?'

Mal acquiesced to being seated and laid the gun on Ozaki's table. He rubbed his hand, it was still hurting badly.

'Simon you want to buy Serenity from me and reregister her under a new company name so the black-list can be lifted from the crew?'

'Yes.'

'And then we all come work for you?'

'Yes.'

'You pay me the money and I get happy wearing a captain badge and calling you boss? You really think that's going to happen?'

'I had rather hoped…'

'I want in. It's never been about the money for me. I want to be a partner. I want to use the money to buy a percentage of Med-Express.'

'Mal, that was never on the table.'

Mal patted the gun.

'It is now.'

'No. Absolutely not. This is not how we do business. I want Serenity because I want you all along with me on this. Believe me, from a business perspective, buying Serenity is not smart. I could rent transport for much less of an outgoing. Put the gun away and make your case like one business man to another. Convince me to let you buy in.'

Mal took the gun off the table and slid it into his holster.

'We all came to that boat for a variety of different reasons, but we stayed for the same one, because we had found what we wanted most; freedom. You want us all to stay together, I get that, and I get what you are trying to do for us, I truly do. But you're missing the big picture; you buy Serenity, regardless of your intentions you'll be taking that freedom from us. You would be better off renting transport.'

Simon didn't say anything.

'I want in, but not just for myself, I want to use the money from the sale of Serenity and buy us all in, equal like. Partners, not employees. You have to give them something more from this venture than a salary. They have earned more respect than that, even Jayne. You want us because you can trust us. You can send us to who knows where and you know we'll get the job done and come back home ready for the next run. Show us we can trust you and you'll have that faith reciprocated a hundred times over. How much is that worth to you Doctor?'

'Everything. But Mal, I've thought this through; I thought about partnership, it's just too risky. I couldn't drag you into the debt we would all be responsible for if the business collapsed.'

'Let all of us worry about that 'stead of just yourself.'

Simon considered in silence for a minute than spoke.

'Five percent each, that's twenty in total; one fifth of the business between the crew. Alliance get their cut and I keep control of the rest. That is the one and only offer I'm going to make.'

'Doctor Tam,' said Ozaki, 'I urge caution.'

Simon waved him away.

'And what about Serenity?'

'Company vehicle. Reregistered, recatalogued and renamed. I'll have a clause written into our contract that she is only for resale to you while we are both alive.'

'Renamed? You want to change Serenity's name?'

'Have to. Part of the law. But I have a suggestion.' Simon wrote on a scrap of paper and passed it over to Mal. Mal read what it said and nodded.

'I can live with that. So Doctor, do we have an agreement?'

'Partners?'

'Partners.'

They shook on it and sealed the deal. Med-Express was born.

* * *

Kaylee and River sat in a shuttle lounge twenty stories up in the Camorr district of Arial's second city Uphaydron. They were waiting for Mal and Simon to return from the lawyers. Through one of the few windows dotted around the lounge Kaylee could see their fancy shuttle on its pad and a lot of sky. There were other seats to look at, a noisy multi-screen and not a lot of anything else. Kaylee was bored out of her mind.

At one point in the hour they had been sitting there a family of dwarfs had come in, paid their fee and taken off in a yellow shuttle shaped like the letter H. She hadn't recognised the model just concluded that it was damned ugly; other that that nothing much of note had happened.

'This is chronic,' she said, 'the last time I was on Arial it was my first time on a core planet and what did I get to see? A garbage dump and the underside of a _fhey-hu_ flier. Now here I am again, on a core planet, a place of culture and beauty and luxury and shopping renowned the 'verse over and what am doing?' She didn't wait for River to reply, 'sitting in a shuttle lounge picking the knickers out of my _kun-dong_. It's not right I tell you.'

'Mal said to wait.'

'That's as may be but whenever does Mal do what he says? Not so very often if y'question my opinion.'

River stared up at the multi-screen; a program had finished and adverts had begun to play. An advert for Oogie Bars started. Its sing-song mix of Mandarin and English filled the empty room. Kaylee gave River a side-ways look. The younger woman was staring at the screen. "Oh this is not shiny" thought Kaylee. On-screen an orange octopus was dancing with two hydrocephalic pink children.

River returned her attention to the book she was reading.

'That advert is very annoying,' she said under her breath.

Kaylee laughed nervously.

'So what's that?' she said.

'It's Shepherd Book's Bible.'

'No that,' said Kaylee pointing to her bookmarker.

'Oh, I'm not sure. Simon gave it to me a few months ago. Said it had come in the post on the out-station. He got one too.'

'Can I take a look-see?'

River handed the bookmark to Kaylee and kept reading. Kaylee turned it over in her hands. It was thin, about the size of a playing card and had a centre of mimetic black polyceramic sandwiched between two layers of brushed steel. One side was imprinted with the Alliance symbol; the Chinese character for "Order".

'River, this is an Alliance I.D. card. Are you registered?'

River crumpled up her mouth and gave Kaylee an "I dunno" shrug.

'Come over here.'

Kaylee walked over to a node recessed in the wall dragging River by one elbow. She slipped the card in the slot and waited. A red LED ignited deep within its obsidian surface. She positioned River in front of the node.

'Kaylee maybe this isn't such a good idea.'

'Don't be a scaredy cat. If anything goes wrong we can be on the shuttle and atmospheric in less than minute.'

'What about Mal and Simon?'

'Oh _puddo grou ni hego_ them. They're big boys. Now look into the light.'

A thin red laser scanned River's face first horizontally then vertically. The LED turned green and a rounded box appeared on the screen with the outline of a hand inside it.

'Put your left hand on that and keep it on there.'

River did as she was told. A second scan ran across her palm and the black glassy surface illuminated with a cascade of light and the first refrain from the Alliance anthem.

'You're in,' whispered Kaylee, 'now navigate with your right hand. Choose "PERSONAL RECORDS".'

River did so and a small, rotating 3D image of a young girl in a chequered school uniform, glasses and pigtails appeared.

'Oh River it's you. You look so young.'

River regarded the image but could summon up no emotions. She didn't remember who that was on the screen. It could be any pale little girl. It wasn't her any more, if it ever had been.

'What does it say?'

'It says that I attended Madam Vechancer's Preparatory School for Young Women until the age of twelve. It has my exam results. Then I went to Greater Jundo Excelsory until I was eighteen. I came top of my class each year. I am enrolled at a University on Arial to study Law but have spent the last year on a sabbatical with the Voluntary Youth Mission on a border planet.'

'That's just plain bizarre.'

'And that my parents are dead.'

'Oh River I'm so sorry. This was a bad idea. Stop now.'

River went to terminate her connection by lifting her left hand from the screen but Kaylee suddenly pressed down hard on it.

'What's that?' she said pointing.

'Financial records,' said River reading the button. She pressed it before Kaylee told her to knowing that she was going to. Kaylee read what was on the screen and took a deep breath.

'_Hun ga go hun dun_.'

'That's a lot isn't it?'

'Enough to keep Serenity going at full burn for near a year. River, you're rich. Your parents must have left you money in their will.'

River disengaged from the node and pocketed the I.D. card as it was returned. She went and sat back down and opened her book leaving Kaylee prancing on the spot. Kaylee seemed to come to a conclusion and rushed over and sat down beside River. She started to say her name; River interrupted.

'You don't want to seem crass with another person's money but you want to go shopping.'

'You reading me?'

'No, just knowing you.'

River sighed and looked at her feet.

'I have noticed that my toes have started smelling like my boots.'

Kaylee bounced up and down on her seat grinning manically.

'Okay. But we have to be quick. We don't want to keep Simon and Mal waiting.'

'Sure, sure, not a problem. Just some essentials.'

Kaylee jumped up and did her shiny-happy-clapping dance singing, 'we're going shop-ping… we're going shop-ping…'

The two women climbed on a public hover transport destined for the Bellagius district just as Mal and Simon walked into the shuttle lounge. The two men looked about them.

'Where the Hell have they got to?' asked Mal to the empty room.

Simon shrugged and sat down to watch the multi-screen.

'Never anything but gorram adverts,' he muttered.

'_Fung gung_ women!'

* * *

In a basement communications office less than one klick east of their current position a new message popped up on a slab. The message was read. The reader assessed the information and reached a conclusion. It was of importance. They passed it on up to the next level on the chain of command.

* * *

Mal and Simon had been waiting in the shuttle lounge for almost six hours. They were pacing, one on one side of the room going in one direction the other on the other side going the opposite way. Periodically they passed without a word. Mal was delivering a constant stream of coarse Mandarin. His mood was black.

'_Fung gung, ho gi hun, zi-su-xin boh_ women!' he spat, 'anything could have happened to them. They could be dead. In jail. River could be back in a research lab; that not summoning up any troublesome thoughts for you Doctor?'

Simon stopped pacing and stood looking out the window with his hands joined behind his back. He was worried; he couldn't not be worried. But every neuron in his brain told him that the two women in his life were fine. They were in the heart of the Alliance. Once that would have been a problem, but that was the past. From all appearances and evidence the Alliance wanted nothing more to do with them. Like an embarrassing drunken one-night-stand gone wrong the Alliance had paid them for their time and now wanted them out of the door never to be seen again.

A privately chartered air-taxi with the golden logo of an exclusive boutique glittering on the side smoothly touched down on a nearby pad. One of the doors slid open with frictionless ease and steps automatically descended to the pads surface. A striking woman in a white, backless, ankle-length dress emerged from the taxi and stepped onto the top stair. Her dress was caught by the wind and momentarily pulled tight against her slim, pert body.

'My, my,' said Mal admiringly.

'Indeed,' agreed Simon coming closer to the window.

The woman adjusted her dark, asymmetrically fringed bob with a toss of her head. Slowly, with the utmost caution, holding her dress out at the knees with one hand, a bottle of what looked like champagne in the other, she descended to the pad. On her feet she wore a pair of red-as-sin, six-inch stilettos. The last step seemed tricky for she stumbled but corrected herself quickly and looked about to see whether anyone had noticed. River saw Simon and Mal staring at her in a manner she had never observed before. She waved.

'There are places on this planet where they shave your body for money,' she shouted.

'Oh…' said Simon one hand rising to his mouth.

'_Ki go do mo sho_,' breathed Mal, 'this is all kinds of wrong.'

'Oh my Gods Mal,' Simon pointed at his waving sister, 'that's my little sister.'

'Get ready for more Doc 'cause there's your girlfriend.'

Kaylee rounded the taxi having emerged from the other side. She had a martini glass in one hand and an unrealistic number of bags over her other. Her hair was coloured a golden brown and cut straight around her chin. She was wearing smoky, dark make-up around her eyes that made her look like she had insatiable passions running deep within her veins. Her lips were a livid red and seemed to have become somehow plumper. She set the glass down on the pad. This turned out to be quite a balancing act in the mid-thigh, phenomenally tight green dress and strappy platforms she was wearing. She thumped the taxi bodywork four times and gave the pilot the thumbs-up. Smiling, obviously pleased with her self, she bent at the knees and retrieved her glass. Her cleavage looked spectacular. She finished her drink as she crossed the pad and entered the lounge ahead of River tossing the empty glass into a bin without looking. It shattered on the ground because there was no bin there.

She draped her free arm around a speechless Simon and pressed the round of her belly against his groin.

'Hello lover,' she purred. She kissed him wetly and slipped her tongue into his mouth. She tasted of alcohol and fruit and cream. But mostly alcohol.

Simon let out a little squeak.

Mal bowed to River and extended one arm. She curtsied and slipped her fingers into his hand. He lightly placed his other hand on her hip and together they began a silent waltz. She blended to his lead like a natural laughing every time he whirled her in a new direction. Mal took her into a plunge, liquid spilled over her hand from the bottle she still held and fizzed on the floor beneath them. Mal straightened and let River spin away from him.

'Gods little one, if I was ten years younger and you were a little blind in one eye…' Her fringe fell across her face and she moved it with a puff from between pursed lips.

'I feel a little nauseas now.'

'… and that's my cue. Doctor we're well past the time we should've been making tracks. I reckon I'll pilot.'

Simon immediately called shotgun.

* * *

In a mid-level communications office on Arial's sister-planet, the second core planet Manchu, a new message popped up on a slab. The message was read. The reader assessed the information and reached a conclusion. It was of importance. They passed it on up to the next level on the chain of command.

* * *

Mal marched from the shuttle into the cargo bay along one of the gantries. Simon led both the women past and down into the ship. Jayne was on the floor below lifting weights.

'Jayne get showered and get fed we got jawwin' to do.'

''m I in trouble Mal?'

'Most probably but not with me, we got business to attend to.'

'Hey you bring some fun with you… _Hun xi go!_… that's River and Kaylee. Mal, what sort of business are we getting into?'

An hour later the entire crew of Serenity except Jayne were gathered around the dinner table in the ships living quarters. Candles were lit and stomachs were full courtesy of River and Kaylee's purchases. Jayne was going through their bags looking for anything of interest. He pulled a square bottle full of caramel liquid from one bag and immediately tore the cork from its neck with his teeth.

'Shiny.'

'Pretty bottles,' slurred Kaylee, 'pretty, pretty… bad bottles!'

River had her chin on the table and was staring at her flute of sparkling drink.

'Non-dimensional nucleating points expanding exponentially until their disparity in mass in relation to their local environment displaces them randomly diminishing an open-system's entropy.'

Jayne took down three glass tumblers from a shelf and brought them over to the table. He filled all three and passed one to Mal and the second to Simon. He put the bottle in the middle of the table then changed his mind and put it on the floor near his feet where he could keep a closer eye on it before sitting down.

'So,' he said, 'business then.'

'Over to the good doctor I reckon.' Mal stared at the glass of liquor and raised it to his lips before hesitating and setting it back on the table untouched.

'Ah, right, hi. Okay.'

'Might be,' said Mal to Simon, 'that if a business man is desiring being regarded with seriousness he should learn to cut to the chase and leave the adorable preamble for the ears of his great-aunts.'

Simon blushed.

Jayne smirked which annoyed Mal greatly as he hadn't meant to sound unkind.

'You're right Mal. Thank you. So first order of business…' Kaylee's head hit the table with a gentle thud and she began to snore, '… will be putting our chief-mechanic and only pilot to bed.'

'Set them in the chairs. A blanket will do kindly until morning.' suggested Mal.

'Kinder'n dropping 'em down into their bunks,' said Jayne.

Simon led a pliant Kaylee over to one chair and tucked her in. Jayne lifted River over and laid her down on the only sofa.

'Light for a killer-woman,' he said before dropping to one knee. He started to unbuckle her shoes.

'What are you doing?' asked Simon.

'These things are murder to sleep in, just doing her a mercy.'

'I'm not even going to ask how you know that.'

Jayne chuckled and playfully punched Simon on the shoulder, 'Ain't my first time 'round sluts Doc.'

Simon straightened and with a great effort of will unclenched his jaw muscles.

'Jayne. Listen to me and listen very carefully because I'm going to lay this out for you once and once only. You work for me now and in this organisation we will have standards. My standards. You fail to uphold them and you're off this boat for good.'

Jayne snorted derisively through his nose.

'Don't mistake my calmness for lack of anger Jayne.' Each word was clipped and hard. 'The ink isn't even dry on your contract and you just called two members of the crew sluts. My sister and girlfriend …sluts! This ends now. The lack of respect ends now. The sexual abuse. The threats. The thuggery, it all ends right here and right now. So help me if you disrespect another member of a crew of mine I'll have you dropped on the nearest rock and if there's air on it then that won't be through premeditation.'

The two men glared at each other. Mal shifted quietly in his seat in case he needed to clear the table at speed.

'You mighten't realised it yet,' snarled Jayne, 'but those qualities a'mine you're pissin' all over are exactly what your goin' to be needin' out on the edge of this venture of yours.'

'I'm a rich man Jayne. I can hire those kinds of qualities as and when I need them. I don't need them full-time on one of my boats.' Simon walked past the much larger man and sat back in his seat at the table. 'Get in line or get gone Cobb.'

Jayne stood with his back to them for a while, his shoulders rising and falling, then slowly turned and walked back to his place at the table. He sat down.

'Let my mouth run bad. Apologise for insulting River and Kaylee while they weren't awake to hit back. They work hard. I got no problems with them cutting loose; reckon they've earned it like any one of the rest f'us.'

'Thank you.'

Jayne drained his glass and Mal tensed, thinking for an instant that he intended to smash it into the back of the Doctor's head. Instead he set it down and refilled it.

'So,' said Mal, 'business then.'

Spontaneous laughter broke out at the table between the three men.

'Talk to us Doc. What's up.'

'Nice. Our company is called Med Express and we will be supplying Alliance medicines at core prices to the border and outer settlements. Currently the company consists of us, this ship, a warehouse on Iodo and four plots of land, one on each of her moons.'

'What're they for?'

'Local distribution nodes Jayne. We're going to build a network. Iodo will be our central store. The planet follows a slow orbit straight through the system so it's the ideal place to set up our operations. That's where everything coming from the core will arrive. We'll be buying in bulk to keep prices to a minimum. The plan is to build smaller buildings on all our destinations where the buyers are; six to a planet at most depending upon population densities and landmass distributions. We ship from the core to Iodo and then from Iodo to any of the nodes and from there to anywhere on that planet.'

'And you're payin' for all this?'

'To begin with yes. But that's where it gets complicated.'

'You haven't mentioned the contract,' said Mal.

'Right. Nothing is worth a _gossu_ without the contract with the Alliance NGO's. They supply all the buildings after the first warehouse free of charge. They are prefabricated and shipped in crates, just need erecting wherever we have a bit of land. They are also subsidising all of our stock purchases as well as facilitating any loans we might need to take out.'

'And they're just doing this, what? Out of the goodness of their tin hearts?'

'No of course not. It's a business. We pay them for the pharmaceuticals, at the reduced rate and they take a percentage of the quarterly dividends.'

'How much of a percentage?' asked Mal.

'Quarter. Twenty-five per cent.'

There was silence around the table. Simon felt like he was loosing them.

'I've done the sums. Gods it's all I've done for the past few months. Even if my conservative projections come through we'll be turning a profit within the year. In the black in three.'

'And how much of this is mine?' asked Jayne.

'Five percent.'

'That means five percent of the debt if this all goes ankles up. Damn. I didn't sign anything.'

'Yes you did,' said Mal, 'I signed on your behalf.'

Jayne snorted air through his nose and shook his head.

'Shiny. And there's no-one else out there that doesn't bear the same thinking as you? It's just going to be us bringing civilisation to the fuzzy-wuzzies?'

'No,' conceded Simon with a sigh, 'and that's where the point you made earlier on about venturing onto the edge becomes relevant. There is other interest, big interest from big corporations and there is no way they are going to want to share their space with us. They are slow to start, nervous of the risk associated with moving out of the core, but once the big cogs start rolling, if we don't have our feet firmly anchored we're going to get swept clean away.'

Simon looked to the both of them.

'We're pioneers, looking to stake our claims and it may be that we might have to defend them with more than strongly worded letters from lawyers. This whole plan hinges on us being small, being first and being mobile, knowing the lay of the land and being willing to take risks. But we also have to be efficient and do things, or be seen to be doing things, by the book. That way we get more Alliance trust and more trust equals more Alliance contracts. So, I'm going to say this once to you two now and never again in public. You are going to be my A-team. You will be the centre of all my operations and I will trust you implicitly. If wickedness walks into our yard and if necessity necessitates – we never do it in uniform. Agreed?'

Jayne slammed his glass on the table, 'Agreed. Damn, I always wanted to be in the A-team.'

Mal looked at Simon for longer than he was entirely comfortable with before speaking.

'Uniforms?'

'Yes Mal, we'll be wearing uniforms.'

'They best be tight about my ass. Cannot let the womenfolk down.'

'And as for my stipulation?'

'No shooting bad guys while in uniform. Shiny. Can we wear neckerchiefs over our faces though? Maybe grow twirlable moustaches?'

'One more thing; you're going to be loosing a member of your crew but gaining two new ones.'

'Who?'

'Me. I am going to be staying on Iodo. I will be spending a lot more time in the core, it's up to me to get new contracts and I have to be close to accomplish that. I can't be out of contact with the cortex.'

'And the new members?'

'Med-Express' first employee, a sales representative and an outside contract, a scientist from a University on Arial. The researcher will need one of the shuttles converted into a mobile laboratory, so they'll both need bunk space on the ship cleaned out for them. And River is going to need a permanent bunk. I don't think it is a good idea for any of the crew to be sleeping apart, down below.'

Simon stood up and yawned, 'I have some work to do on the cortex. I will see you gentlemen in the morning.'

Mal and Jayne were left alone at the table. One of the candles guttered out rendering an end of the room to darkness. Nothing lasted forever. Jayne stood with the bottle in his hand.

'Goin' to hit m'scratcher.'

He walked away towards the bunks.

'Jayne?' called Mal, 'Not that I would've ever previously have cared, but now that we both own an equal share of this boat, what are your thoughts on all this?

Jayne stood silhouetted in the doorway.

'You okay about this Mal, all this change?'

Mal considered his question before answering.

'Yes, yes I really am.'

'Well I suppose that's good.'

Jayne slugged from the bottle, ''cause to a certain eye it might look like you just got into bed with the Alliance and gave away our home.' The knife inserted, Jayne descended to his bunk. Mal sat at the table staring at the glass of liquor in front of him until the final candle went out and the whole room went dark. Then he drank it.

**The end of Chapter Two**

**If you have read this far please take a second to leave a review.**


	3. Chapter 3

**Symbols of Freedom**

**Season Two: Episode One**

A freely distributed message from your leader, Trad Sol, Unified President of the Allied Federation of Civilised Planets.

"_My fellow citizens... You are awesome and I love you. Love can sometimes mean forgiving those that have done you wrong; sometimes it can regrettably mean having to take control of others in order to save them from their weaknesses. Ten years ago we were drawn into a conflict with a disparate rabble of malcontents. They called our disagreement a war of independence. Our righteousness demonstrated the error of their ways. Time has passed. The Alliance persists .We have gone on with our lives growing better, bigger and closer to perfection with each passing season. But on the few planetoids that exist out there in space I sadly must inform you that there are humans still suffering the aftereffects of that "war". They live unfulfilled lives unable to access the same media and economic opportunities that we take for granted. They live lawless lives. Can you imagine that my fellow citizens? Worlds without police? It is time to show them our love. It is time to help them come back to us; to civilization. Over the next year I am personally embarking upon a brave mission of re-education to these worlds. I want to bring our brothers and sisters back into the fold. Our Alliance will grow and with it new markets will be opened. Come with me, your president, as I extend the hand of opportunity to these forgotten few. You can watch my mission on an acceptable pay-per-view channel for a competitive subscription fee. Colonial One will start her epic voyage as soon as viewing figures make our generosity financially viable. Support Sol!" _

**

* * *

**

**Chapter Three: ****The Business**

**One month later****…**

Mal regarded his reflection in the mirror in his bunk. He liked what he saw. The package from Simon had come with a short hand-written note. "Hope you approve." Mal found that he did.

He buttoned his brown jacket with white piping across his chest and rubbed fluff from a sleeve. It was very nice indeed. High quality stitching and tightly woven material tailor made to each of their dimensions. His title was tastefully embroidered on the left side of his chest: Captain Reynolds. Simon's eye for detail was impressive and had been translated into an impressive looking crew. Mal tucked his trousers into his newly polished boots and pulled on his cap. It had a symbol on the front, a stick with a snake wound around it; the company logo.

He pulled on his long coat, the one with all the buckles, and climbed the steps out of his bunk. The rest of his crew were waiting for him in the cargo hold. He stood on the stairs outside the Med-lab and looked down on them, his three original crew and his two new members, standing in a line; all in brown. It was just like old times. Mal felt a lump of pride well up in his throat but understanding his role here did not let it show.

His new crew; Cobb, Winnit, Tam, Tracey and Iddyodo.

'Welcome to the first flight of the Med-Express interplanetary cargo ship Freedom,' Captain Reynolds said.

Kaylee and River shared a girlish little giggle at Mal's formality that was quickly shushed by a very serious looking Jayne. He then looked to the two new crew members as if to communicate that that was how things were done on this ship. Iddyodo looked back at him as if he belonged to a special category of retard.

Mal found their new scientist to be a strange fish indeed. She had strong Asian features but was very tall and deathly pale. Her short hair was an extreme white colour and the sides of her head were bald. Set into her cranium above the ears on both sides of her head she had golden cybernetic implants; two ergonomic panels that followed the curve of her skull. Mal found her impossible to read. So far he could detect nothing wrong with her, but that anyone would willingly have machinery connected to their brain left him feeling unsettled in their presence.

Mal pulled an official piece of paperwork from one pocket and unfolded it. It was the directives for their first job.

'So, to the work at hand. We are on way from Iodo to her second moon Crystalmede. Our mission is two-fold: first to recruit and oversee a work-crew in the erection of our first distribution node,' Mal indicated the huge crates that filled most of Freedom's hold, 'and secondly, to recruit a full-time administrative and security detail to man the node.'

He looked up from the paper.

'Chief Engineer Winnit, how is the ship running?'

'Smooth as a well shaved man-whore Cap'n.'

Mal smothered a laugh: more shushing from Jayne.

'Senior pilot Tam, what is our arrival time?'

'ETA two hours captain, weather on Crystalmede is fair. Captain.'

River saluted, unsure what the proper conduct was.

'Gangmaster Cobb,' Jayne bristled to attention, 'I want you and Representative Tracey to conduct the interviews. I recommend you take River with you, you may find her useful.' Jayne nodded, understanding what Mal was implying without sharing it with the new crew.

'Doctor Iddyodo?'

'I have equipment that still needs to be installed.'

'Perhaps Engineer Winnit could assist.'

'I don't think that will be necessary thank you. I am fully skilled in the operation of all the apparatus in my laboratory.' Simon had retro-fitted Inara's shuttle for the researcher's needs. As yet Mal was not sure exactly what her role onboard the ship was intended to be.

'Captain Reynolds, I'd like to know why we need our pilot at the interviews. I am more than capable of conducting the sessions without additional assistance.'

Cruiser Tracey the third was their Med-Express sales representative. He was Simon's business voice in absentia. He had a pleasant way about him and Mal found that he was a skilled settler, his presence made situations more relaxed by the simple fact of him being in the room. He was of average height, no taller then Kaylee but had an above average build. His shoulders were broad and his neck and thighs thick with muscle. His only piece of additional luggage had been a solid, leather punch-bag nearly as big as he was. It was hanging underneath a gantry along the side of the cargo hold. He drilled on it hard for at least an hour every day using all his limbs to strike the bag. His hair was long and blonde and he wore it in a series of small knots running down the middle of his head all the way to the nape of his neck. Mal guessed that he was about the same age as he was.

'Mister Tracey, I have found that our pilot has an extremely refined instinct when it comes to judging the character of strangers. Take her presence to be what it is, an advantage. And anyway, she goes where she pleases, she's a partner.'

'That's fine; just curious. Glad to have you with us pilot Tam.'

River smiled and saluted him.

Mal found it absolutely adorable.

'Ok people. Crystalmede is a working colony. These people sweat hard for a living so respect their perspectives and don't be surprised if you don't encounter much in the way of enlightened conversation. The gravity is four fifths of human norm so take it easy until you have adapted.'

The crew nodded. Mal looked them over for a moment then nodded himself.

'Let's get it done,' he said.

* * *

For seven days the work went well. The first stage of the construction of the node was to set up a security perimeter. Contractors from an open-cast bauxite mine three valleys away brought some heavy machinery and levelled the plot then rolled it flat. A second team from a nearby settlement dropped a series of holes marking out their perimeter. Into these holes went concrete poles and between the poles was strung flexi-mesh topped with razor wire. It wasn't until Mal was happy with the fencing that he gave orders for the first buildings to come out of their crates. For four days Jayne, Mal, Cruiser, Kaylee and River and a gang of labourers in need of coin worked like demons in the punishing Crystalmede sunlight. Their work paid off because nearly a week ahead of schedule the node was installed. They had erected four white buildings, arranged like the letter E, in the orange dust. An administration building with three rooms: two of which would one day be a doctor's surgery if they could find a suitably entrepreneurial sawbones, a large storage building, a cooled unit with three compartments of varying sizes for the storage of medicines and biological samples, and a final building containing a combined solar collector and kilmerite generator. They had power; they were ready to go.

That night the administration building was firebombed. They had not had time to erect the security lighting and could not see who did it. But they could hear them. At least three vehicles with rough engines and at least a dozen people, mostly all male, probably all drunk and all local if the accents that permeated their screaming abuse were anything to go by.

Kaylee had rigged a water pump and her speed and ingenuity had saved the other buildings, but the administration block was gone; reduced to an acrid stack of smoking supports and plastic by the morning.

Mal got Simon on the cortex.

'This was to be expected Mal. Sometimes the locals aren't going to want us on their ground. We're new. Foreign. They are going to have to learn to trust us. Whatever you do don't retaliate, rebuild. Keep going. The insurance will cover the costs. I've got another ship arranged to fly out to you tomorrow with the medical stock. I'll have them delay their flight by a few hours and pack another pre-fab. Don't worry; the cavalry is on the way.'

Mal stood with Jayne on Freedom's ramp.

'Cavalry's on the way. We're to sit tight until they get here.'

'That so?'

'Yup.'

'You sure you heard Simon right? Is an awful long way away for a signal to get garbled?'

Mal stretched his back and groaned.

'Been working awful hard this weather. Body deserves a bit of relaxation.'

'That include libation?'

'Reckon it just might. You in the colour for a bar-crawl, see what turns up?'

'You're buying.'

* * *

Business was steady in the "Ball and Bat". Its owner stood behind the bar admiring his recently acquired multi-screen. He was streaming recent matches from the core and his investment was starting to pay for itself. On a normal night his place would have been as deserted as the scrub outside. Tonight nearly twenty men, miners from the bauxite works sat drinking, cheering the plays.

The front door of his establishment opened with such force that for a second he thought someone had driven a truck through it. A large man had walked into his bar. He had a dark goatee beard and was dressed in a sleeveless T-shirt and cargo pants and wore a white construction hat on his head. He was holding a piece of wood as long as one of his legs and as thick as a glass-blower's forearm.

'I'm in the mood to wale on some pussy-faced bitches.'

He looked about him.

'Looks like I came to the right place.'

Violence ensued.

Mal sat on the quad-cart outside the bar and listened to someone scream "Not my multi-screen… Please, not the …" There was an almighty crash followed by the sounds of a ruckus. More screams. The distinctive _krish!_ of a bottle of booze being broken over someone's head and more screaming. Some more ruckusing; then just various forms of moaning. Mal massaged his left hand; he had hurt it again. A minute later Jayne sauntered out through what was left of the front door and down the steps. He indicated across the scrub with his pacifier.

'Two miles that way,' he said.

He climbed on the back of the quad and they set off to what would be the fifth bar that night.

* * *

Cruiser was hunched over his slab. He had planned to be in the admin block by now, happily wiring it for cortex connectivity and arranging desks and filing cabinets in readiness of the arrival of their new staff. Unhappily he was sitting in the almighty white emptiness of the warehouse running costs. The numbers his calculations were producing were growing at a frightening rate. He found the business part of his mind hoping for an outbreak of something rare and contagious; soon.

He finished up his work and exited the building. He locked the small side door he had used and was instantly plunged into darkness. The heavens glittered with a chilly radiance. Iodo sat low in the sky like a half-buried silver coin the size of a mountain. Dark spots cast by the shadows of her moons could be seen tracing miniature nights across the surface of the planet. Further out, and at this distance appearing to be little more than blue-white moth-catcher, was the gas giant Gigitamorre. Going out further still the giant was dwarfed by the rest of the binary system. This was where humanity had settled; within the grasp of the two orbiting suns, Sol and Helo and their conjoined systems of over forty planets and countless moons. Physically Cruiser was less than a mote of matter, but consciously, his mind encompassed reality.

He broke the spell by switching on his hand-held spotlight. Something black against the dark background shot past him at the edge of his extended beam of light. He swept the spot left and right but could see nothing. He suddenly noticed that the night had grown very quiet, as if it was holding his breath.

Cruiser had been born and had grown up off-core on a border planet so when his gut told him to be scared he knew that it could be trusted. For the first time since the Unification War he wished he was carrying a gun. It was pointless to try and pretend that he had not been seen; the twenty meter long beam ten-thousand candles of light strong was a dead give away. He edged along the wall of the warehouse towards Freedom.

The ship was bathed in silvery light reflected from Iodo. It looked regal and aloof like an avian sphinx staring beyond the horizon and into infinity. The cargo ramp was down and her cargo-bay was illuminated. He could see movement inside but not who or what was making it.

He decided to make a break for it. He threw the spot-light as hard as he could to his left towards the security fence and with his slab tucked under his arm began to run. The reduced gravity gave his legs additional power and he had the sensation of almost flying above the ground he was moving so quickly. Behind him there was a feral outburst of aggression and he heard his lamp pop. There were sounds all around him; scrabbling feet throwing grit behind them and more growls. The darkness grew teeth and swarmed close. Something big and solid hit hard against his hip. He kept his feet but felt one leg go numb. He swung the slab as hard as he could in a wild arc but made contact with nothing but night air. Another impact and he rocked back bright lights sparking across his vision. He swung the slab like an axe and felt a satisfying thump. Something yelped. More black detached from the dark and he was knocked face first into the dust. And then they were on him. Dogs.

He protected his throat but they had his leg and one had him by the side. The pain was terrible and he cried out. They were all over him, shaking ferociously. He couldn't get his balance back. He scrabbled in the dirt trying to find a grip with his hands but one dog got his arm and suddenly he was being pulled away from Freedom back towards the buildings. He screamed for help and felt teeth enter his shoulder. They grated against bone as the dog yanked its head from side to side. He could smell them all over him. He tried not to go down on the ground again thinking it would be the end of him if he did but there were too many of them and he was unarmed. He was pulled down. He curled into a foetal ball and through the panic prayed they would grow bored and leave him before he was ripped apart.

Something splashed across his face. For an instant he thought an artery was severed and that he was a dead man. Then it registered that it was cold. His blood wouldn't feel cold. The security lighting came on and he was hit again by a jet of water from Kaylee's fire-suppression pumping system. She blasted the dogs around him and they backed off. He saw a space and tried to move through it to get away but he felt teeth in his calf and an explosion of white-hot pain. He twisted round onto his back and kicked at its face. Its eyes were slits buried in a powerful head of folded flesh and fangs. There was movement above him and he brought his arms up to cover his face thinking it was another dog. It was River, leaping from the roof of the generator trailing a long sheet of transparent packing plastic.

She landed astride the dog and instantly wrapped the sheet around its head. It tried to scrabble away but she had it firmly pinned with her thin, dancer's arms. The inside of the sheet filled with slavers and condensed breath and the animal became obscured. She felt it pause in order to gather its strength, but before it could she rolled it on its side wrapping more sheeting around its head; twisting tighter. The dog was nearly the same size as her and probably heavier. It flopped down and she dropped her knee into its throat and arched her back choking it with all her might. Cruiser watched, unable to believe what he was seeing. It died right there before his eyes. River stood over the carcass and looked at Cruiser; it was as if she had done nothing more significant than switch out a light.

A voice was projected across the night and filled the compound. It wasn't electronically amplified but it seemed impossible that it could be so loud without any of them being able to see its source. It was a womans voice.

'You're walking in Mama La Force's backyard. My boys won't die so gentle again. Get gone. You been told.'

* * *

Mal and Jayne walked up Freedom's ramp laughing.

'I tell ya' Mal, I ain't ever gonna get tired of beatin' on low-gee wimps.'

Mal laughed, nodding.

'You believe the look on their faces when the bar started to move?'

Jayne, laughing so hard he could hardly speak, mimicked the panic-stricken locals.

'Ur ber! Ur ber! Itz moo-veen!'

The two men, bent over double, stood on the landing ramp and laughed until tears were running down their faces.

'First time I ever used a quad to pull a whole bar into a ravine.'

'They sure didn't see that coming.'

The laughing started to diminish.

'Mal, what's that?'

'Appears someone has left us a present.'

'Sure don't like the way they gift-wrapped it.'

Jayne prodded the dead dog with one foot. Blood that had foamed on its lips squelched against the inside of the plastic. Mal drew his gun and Jayne hoisted his pacifier. They covered the cargo bay with a combination of speed and great care. At the entrance to the living quarters they could hear Kaylee's voice. She sounded anxious. They burst into the Med-Lab weapons high. Kaylee screamed fit to burst ear-drums.

Cruiser was perched on the edge of the main bed pulling a suturing needle through his arm. He jumped at the scream and winced with pain. He was stripped down to his briefs. Blood covered clothes were scattered across the floor. His shoulder, side and leg were bandaged.

Kaylee hit Mal on the chest, 'What are you doin' jumpin' in like that? Near did an unladylike in m' breeches.'

'What happened here?'

'Pack of dogs done rip up Cruiser.'

'Jayne?'

'On it Mal.' He ran back outside to secure their perimeter.

'You all right?'

'I'll live,' said Cruiser through gritted teeth. He tied off the stitches and wrapped some gauze over his forearm.

'That looked like it hurt,' said Mal.

'Did,' agreed Cruiser, 'though probably not as much as this is going to.' He reached into a drawer and pulled out a big syringe with a long gauge needle. He filled the syringe with a yellow fluid and then, pulling the front of his briefs down, placed the tip of the needle above the crest of his pubic bone. He took a deep breath.

'Rabies shot?'

'Yeah.' Cruiser slid the needle a full hands depth into his gut and after the slightest of sounds began to slowly depress the plunger. Kaylee looked away.

'Believe it or not but I have a very good idea what that feels like.'

Cruiser pulled the needle out and handed it to Mal and then swabbed the injection point.

'You got medical experience then?'

'Field medic in the war.'

'Huh. That a fact?'

'Yes and if you don't mind I think I'm going to pass out now.'

Mal helped Cruiser lie flat on the bed and put a blanket over him; then gave him a shot of Morphogene. His breathing settled immediately. They crept out of the Med-Lab and quietly closed the door behind them.

River was sitting on the easy chairs outside. She was curled up with her knees in her chest and a haunted expression on her face. Mal had not seen her look like that in quite a time. Mal sat himself on the edge of one of the seats. Kaylee sat on her other side and put a comforting arm around her shoulders.

'You all there little one?'

'She's coming.'

'That so? When?'

'Nightfall. Witches always come at the time of dying-day.'

* * *

There were times when there was absolutely nothing good about being the leader. This was one of those times. Mal sat on a mound of dirt opposite the gates to the compound. It had been pushed up by the wheels of the construction vehicles they had hired to clear the site. He stared at the compound and at all the work they had done. The wind was singing a doleful little tune as it blew through the twisting line of razor wire. Freedom was staring into the distance, refusing to meet his eye.

He picked himself up and brushed the orange dust of Crystalmede from his trousers. Mal walked back to the ship and let his hand run over the pneumatic supports of the cargo-bay ramp. He had let himself down and dragged the whole crew down with him. He had known in his gut that what they were doing was wrong from the outset. He had wanted to convince himself that they were doing good works, he believed that they still could, but that couldn't begin to happen until they had dealt with their current situation.

'Done, gone and let her down.' said Mal to himself. He had been trying to think; to plan a way out of this situation they had found themselves in. He had been scheming, thinking about what he had at his disposal; Freedom, two shuttles, the fenced-off compound, the freezer units, the kilmerite fuel-rods, the terrain, the physical advantage of not having been born on a low-gee planet; he had drawn a blank. It had taken him a while to realise that he had known all along what he had to do.

His crew came first. He had forgotten that essential truth of being a leader; everyone else came before you yourself. His newest member of the crew was lying in the Med-Lab, his scientist hadn't come out of her shuttle in days. River had reverted to her introverted and unpredictable state of mind. Kaylee was pottering about franticly in the engine room but not singing which meant she was terrified. Even Jayne who had been making such an effort to reform and act responsibly had been dragged back into his old violent ways. Mal was at the centre of it all. He had let them all down. He had let himself down. He had let the colours he was wearing down. There was reckoning coming, he had to get them all ready; but first, he had to get himself ready.

* * *

Mama La Force strapped a harness over her remaining eight clones, lashing them in two by two. She was missing a lead dog. Brutus. She wore his collar round her own neck. She climbed on her chariot and coiled leather reins around her left hand. With her right she swung her long whip on a stick in a thin arc above the heads of the dog-team. The first tendrils of russet light caught the edge of the horizon as the smaller of the sun-gods touched the mountains. The whip cracked and her chariot surged forwards. She had an appointment with some trespassers. And one in particular had caught her attention; the little dog-killer. Her, she had special intentions towards. Come darkness and Mama was going to be feeding her pack a witch, one cauterized lump at a time.

* * *

Mal pounded on the shuttle door. There was no answer from inside though when he put his ear to its surface he could hear the scientist moving about inside.

'Doctor Iddyodo, you need to know what is occurring. Trouble's on its way. The crew is gathering now. Need you to be there.'

He walked down to check on Cruiser in the Med-Lab. Before he had even reached the bottom of the gantry stairs Freedom shook as one of her shuttles launched. Well, at least he could be clear about where the scientist stood in all this. He pushed open the door and greeted Cruiser.

'You look like _gousu_.'

'Thank you Captain Reynolds, that's encouraging to hear because to be honest I feel like _hu-tu ni gousu_.'

'No, just _gousu_. We need to talk.'

With a pained expression Cruiser raised his body up on the bed.

'You're Simon's business representative here on Freedom so it's only fair that you know what's going on.'

'Ok. It's all gone bad right? That woman with the dogs sent a bunch of locals to burn us out and when that didn't work she came herself. And now she'll probably be coming back with the dogs and the locals to do us in for good. We running?'

'No. We're standing our ground.'

'That wise? There's probably going to be more than a dozen people when they come, armed plus God alone knows how many dogs that woman has got. We've got what? You, Cobb, Kaylee, Pilot Tam and Iddyodo. We'll be outnumbered by more than three to one.'

'Iddyodo cleared out.'

'Clever woman. Four to one.'

'And I want you to stay put. This is Serenity business.'

'What?'

'It's a long story. This crew, it's special. It's got history. There's a way we do things, don't always get it right to start with but we make amends. Make things right. We done wrong in the way we came here; flattening the land and throwing up razor-wire. Up to us to set it right and pay the price if we can't. You're our business man but this ain't any of your business and I'm sorry you got dragged in.'

'Captain Reynolds, while I respect you greatly and have no desire to disagree with you, I work for Simon Tam, he pays my wages, not you. While I am on your ship I'll obey your commands but I take my orders from Doctor Tam.'

'Talk to him then. He'll tell you to do the same thing.'

'Why would he do that?'

Mal smiled.

'Because whether he likes it or not Simon's a part of my crew and I'm still his captain.'

* * *

Mal, Jayne, Kaylee and River stood in the middle of the dirt-road outside the compound and watched the wisp of dust in the distance grow steadily larger. They were armed but their weapons were holstered, Mal had been very specific about that.

'We're going out there to do right.' He had said, 'That may mean killing some folk but it don't have to. We done wrong the way we came here, throwing up fences like Alliance invaders. Our intentions were righteous but our actions have been cruel. We will apologise: try to set things straight, build some trust. If that can't be then we fight but not until their bullets fly first. Do I have an understanding between us?'

His crew had agreed silently. Mal had given Kaylee the opportunity to stay on Freedom with Cruiser but she had taken one of Jayne's guns and slid it in the trousers of her uniform. Mal had nodded once in approval.

They had walked out of the compound and locked the gates behind them as a group. Jayne had protested, he had volunteered to get on some high ground with Vera and take them out from a distance but Mal had over-ruled him. There would be no games. No subterfuge. No hiding. No more damage to Med-Express property. They did this out in the open like people with nothing to hide. Like honest people.

The woman came first. She travelled in a chariot drawn by eight black attack-dogs, each identical in appearance. She was large with wide hips draped in a garment made from a patchwork of animal skins. Across her chest she wore frilly white lace and her arms were covered in bangles and bracelets and bones and tattoos. On her head she wore a wide-brimmed hat lined with rat-pelts. She pulled up close to them then at the last second pulled hard on the reins and ran in front of them. Mal stood his ground at the front of the group as the charioteer ran a few circles. From under the hat her feral eyes did not leave River. She stopped and with a pull on a cord released the dogs from their harness. She tied up the reins just as four smoking and roaring vehicles full of locals pulled to a stop on the road behind her. Mama La Force was obviously known by the locals. They were skinny, dirty men, dressed in torn boiler-suits and dungarees and carrying a variety of firearms.

Mama stepped out of her chariot and gave a command, 'Stay!'

It was not clear whether she was talking to her dogs or the men. The effect was the same on both. She walked slowly up to Mal. As far as he could see she was not armed but maybe she didn't need to carry weapons. She already had eight that hung on her every breath and would fight to the death in a heartbeat.

Mal met her gaze.

'You Alliance?'

'No mam, just people trying to make an honest living.'

'You look like Alliance.' She walked to one side taking them all in then back to Mal, 'Smell like Alliance.'

'Just folks hoping to set things straight.'

'Can you bring loyal servants back from the dead you honest folks?' She touched the dog-collar lashed round her throat.

'No mam. Same breath, wouldn't been a loyal servant killed if it hadn't been tryin' eat one of my crew.'

'Your crew? But not your right arm. Not your heart. Not your soul. Those you've lost Malcolm Reynolds. Those you've lost.' She glared at River and made a sign at her with one of her hands. 'Little witch,' she hissed, 'Little witch playing at being a girl in my yard but Mama ain't fooled. She sees right through you. Oh yes. Read me this little witch.'

Suddenly River let out a cry and clutched at her head.

'Read me that in your nightmares for a time little witch.'

Mal was in a tight situation. He had to get her attention from River without doing anything that would cause this to escalate.

'Mama..' he started to say.

She slapped him hard across the face. He fought to keep his balance, thought he had it, tried to stand upright, realised he'd lost it and felt one leg nearly buckle under him. He staggered slightly to the side. Mama La Force was no low-gee wimp.

Cheers and whooping sounds came from the trucks. Jayne slipped the catch off his hip-holster and tucked the slip of leather out of the way so he could get a clear draw. She hit him again; a powerful back-hand across his face which knocked the cap off his head. Mal steadied himself, bent down and picked his cap off the ground. He dusted it off and put it back on his head. He could taste blood in his mouth.

'So what should I call you then?' he said as reasonably as he was able.

Mama La Force came forwards with evil in her eyes; but then stopped. She stared at the symbol on his cap; Simon's Med-Express logo.

'The Rod of Asclepius.' She whispered, 'The symbol of the Sun-God's only child. Sickers be appraised.'

She stared at Mal like he was a form of life she had never believed could possibly exist. 'What are you?' she said, 'You healers?'

Mal was unsure what had just occurred.

'Tryin' to be.' He said. His ears popped as the air pressure around them increased suddenly. 'You know this?' He pointed to his head. Dust kicked up around them and he had to squint not to be blinded by the wind. It began to roar like a tornado. On the trucks the locals were holding up their arms and staring into the sky.

'You're either deceivers or ignorant,' said Mama retreating a step.

'Going to have to go with ignorant,' shouted Mal, ''cause there ain't any deceivin' goin' on here on our part.'

'Then there's hope 'cause the ignorant can be learned.'

A shadow rolled over them and dust began to leave the ground like it was being sandblasted. The noise became unbearable, shaking them to their bones. Mama suddenly grabbed Mal close to her and hissed into his ear.

'Learn to learn quick captain 'cause that little witch will be the death of you. You can't heal that one. She was sick a long time before anyone took a knife to her mind.'

Mama pushed Mal away just as a transport ship dropped into position meters above their heads.

'It's the cavalry,' yelled Jayne punching an arm into the air.

'It's the B-team,' said River too quietly for anyone to hear.

* * *

Two panels the size of coffins slid aside on her belly and a pair of multi-barrelled assault cannons dropped into place. They swung independently on motorised gimbals. Then they started firing. The ground erupted as dust-devils of concentrated death whipped across the road. A truck was ripped apart with the rapid _toka-toka-toka_ of large calibre munitions punching through metal. A mist of blood filled the evening air just prior to its fuel tank erupting into a cloud of blackening flame. The guns lashed across the second and third trucks. Men fell to the ground limp and ugly and burst and dead before more fuel detonated. A man fit to shriek above the mayhem ran towards them covered in burning gasoline. Mal shot him in the head. Mama dashed to her dogs. A trail of dust broke away from one of the trucks and followed her. Mal found himself willing her to run harder but faster than the heart could wish she was consumed by Hellfire and sparks. Her dogs began to howl. Some ran and the guns whipped from side to side shredding the animals where they fell.

The fourth truck was moving. The men in the flat-bed were shooting back at the ship. Their driver reversed, spun the steering wheel and started to accelerate away. The ship glided effortlessly forwards and reduced them to burning wreckage in seconds. The truck continued on under its own momentum and trundled off the side of the road and into the scrub gouting a furious red inferno fed on fuel and flesh.

The ship circled back over the crew throwing plumes of smoke across the compound. It tilted to one side, slid around to face them and then eased itself down towards the ground; landing struts extended. Mal clutched his revolver hard with ivory knuckles.

He started to march towards the other ship. Jayne walked out towards the burning vehicles and bodies. He looked down at the man whose passing Mal had eased. He found himself confused with what had happened. He was alive, about that he was sure he was glad; but the means. He shook his head. This had all gone wrong. He would have fought for his life if he had had to. He would have killed them all, each and every single one of them if he had found himself able. But this, this had been done on his behalf. He hadn't even drawn his piece. He felt sick in his stomach, not from the horror of what he was looking upon, but from shame.

Mal was shouting in Mandarin. Striding across the scrub and shouting at the top of his voice. He wasn't even sure what he was saying as his mind was a maelstrom of fury. A platform descended from the belly of the ship attached to three extendible cables. There was single figure standing on it. The light was fading as night approached and Mal couldn't make out any of his features. Kaylee and River were following him to the ship. Kaylee had an arm around River but it didn't look like she was feeling as strong as she was acting. She was crying. The tears made white lines through the orange dust on her face.

The captain of the Oracle stepped off the platform and he and Mal drew face to face. Mal stopped; his mouth fell open with shock. His hand went to his gut and the scar of the bullet-hole that had nearly done him in a year previous. A bullet shot by this man.

'You,' he breathed.

'Damn,' said Saint-Chance, 'I knew that Firefly looked familiar.'

He raised a shotgun to his shoulder.

'Badger says hello.' He fired both barrels, 'And goodbye.'

Mal flew backwards with an arc of blood streaming through the air in his wake.

Kaylee screamed.

Mal had the sensation of floating. The damn low-gee was messing with his senses. He rolled about on the ground. What had happened? He felt like a decapitated head. What was occurring? There was a high-pitched squeal in his ears that was steadily diminishing in intensity. He was looking up into the sky. It soared above him like the shadowy roof of God's cellar, but contorted, like the interior of a fishbowl, tinted purple. It was beautiful. It was his sky; his home. No-one could take that way from him. He smiled at his arrogance and the sky went black.

**The end of Chapter Three**

**If you have read this far and you haven't left any feedback yet than shame on you.**


	4. Chapter 4

**Symbols of Freedom**

**Season Two: Episode One**

An excerpt from the autobiography 'Under the Hood' by James "Howie" Makum.

"_Those were the best days of my life. I've been married three times, loved two of those __wives__; the second – not so much; but God's teeth – what a rack. I've fathered six children, been present for their births, cried like a kitten each and every time. But I have to be honest; working in the Young Bros. Factory for those eight years when we were turning out the Firefly model was the highlight of my life. I wasn't the only one; all of us grease monkeys loved those ships. We made them with our hearts as much as our hands. Not a single one ever got recalled – that's unheard of. Nothing ever goes out perfect. Those Fireflys were the exception that proved the rule. They were functional, designed to be so. Not everyone loved their looks, but once those ships got into your blood you stood no chance of ever seeing beauty in the same way again. They appealed to a certain type of person – a person who found function more attractive than form. There was nothing extraneous in a Firefly. You could throw those ships into Hell and they'd just come rumbling back up with a cargo-bay full of badness. Ironically it was that durability that finally put the company out of business. None of them ever needed regular servicing. No-one ever found the need to buy two in one lifetime. When the last Firefly rolled off the production line I left the trade for good. My heart was broken. Unlike the ships it built, my heart wasn't designed to take that kind of punishment."_

* * *

**Chapter Four: ****The Jump**

Cruiser had spoken to Simon and Simon had confirmed Mal's prediction by telling him to stay on the ship and sit tight. Cruiser had done just that. His body was slowly turning from a rainbow of isolated bruises into one enormous contusion. He had intended to go back down to the Med-Lab after his conversation on the cortex but he had not been able to make it that far. Instead he had creakily lain down on the rug in the living quarters and stared up at the ceiling feeling each and every stinging bite. He felt useless.

He heard the rumble of the engines outside the ship and guessed that the locals had returned. His heart had started to beat faster and he wondered if he shouldn't get a weapon and arm himself. He would do that. After just one more minute of rest. That minute passed, and another and there was still no sound of gunfire. From his position on the floor he wondered what was happening. Slowly he rolled onto his front, gathered his legs beneath him and gritting his teeth through a series of ferocious spasms, pushed up onto his feet. He hobbled along the upper corridor to the cockpit just in time to see a transport-ship float down into view and immediately open fire on a collection of trucks.

The ground caught fire and dense black smoke rose into the air obscuring the ship. It moved forwards and its engines whipped the smoke into a swirling storm of eddies. More gunfire: then the ship wheeled round and moved over the four figures he could see still standing. Like a dark predator of the sea it cruised around the scene of its attack and out of his line of view. He moved forwards to get a better angle and descended half of the stairs between the pilot's seats. He still couldn't see. He climbed back up into the cockpit. It took a while. The ship was visible again.

Its nose was down and it was moving forwards. It hovered above the single figure still standing in middle of the carnage of the road: Jayne. It pivoted fast on its axis and faced Freedom. A harsh yellow light lit up the belly of the ship and the desert underneath. It cast a thin shadow behind Jayne, like the finest touch of a painters brush to a canvas. Something resembling a combusting match-head moved through the air towards Freedom trailing an expanding corkscrew of white smoke.

Cruiser realised it was a rocket just as it impacted with Freedom's hull. She was thrown round ninety degrees with the force of the detonation. A wall of flame rolled up her side and consumed her head darkening the glass of the cockpit. A second wall, this time composed of sound and heat and shrapnel was catapulted upwards within the ship. Cruiser was thrown off his feet. Alarms started to scream. The lights flicked off, then on then off again. Red emergency lighting ignited and started to flash. Freedom sounded like she was having a heart-attack.

Adrenalin flooded his body and his pains were momentarily forgotten. Moving as quickly as he could he grabbed the fire-extinguisher from the wall outside the cockpit and made his way through to the dining space. The room was in a state of disarray. The table was on its side, the chairs were at the far wall and all the cupboards had been thrown open and their contents cast across the floor. Lumps of protein were dripping from the ceiling.

He made his way past the engine room and down to the cargo bay. The smoke was choking. The ablative outer layers of metal had absorbed most of the explosion but there was still a hole in the interior skin large enough to drive a quad through. The gantry above the impact-point was broken in two and hanging on straining rivets. Small fires were scattered around the bay. Molten metal had landed in packaging from the pre-fabs and set it alight. Cruiser blasted them with the extinguisher. He opened the cargo bay doors hoping that the eye-watering smoke would disperse. Kaylee and River walked into the cargo bay. Kaylee was covered in blood. Her face was ashen and she looked as if she was in shock. River had her guns drawn. Her expression was inscrutable. There was something transparent about her, as if she was physically present but her mind was elsewhere. Jayne climbed the ramp with Mal over his shoulder. A trail of blood splattered on the ramp behind him. Cruiser realised it was Mal's blood.

'Med-Lab. Get him to the Med-Lab now.'

Jayne dumped Mal's body on the bed in Med-Lab and fell back against a wall breathing heavily from the effort of carrying the captain.

His body was a mess. Cruiser experienced an instant of doubt then his training kicked in. He had to staunch the bleeding.

'I need universal donor blood. We have any?'

Neither of the women moved. Jayne started going through drawers throwing their contents to the floor.

'It'll be in a cooler Jayne.'

'This it?'

'That's the stuff.' Cruiser popped a needle and ran an I.V. from the bag into Mal's left arm. He examined his body. The sleeve and right shoulder-area of his coat was peppered with black burn-holes and soaked to beyond saturation with blood. He cut up the sleeve and across the chest.

'Shotgun?'

'Yeah,' said Jayne, 'Point-blank.'

Cruiser took a moment and tried to control his heaving stomach. Mal's arm was destroyed. Both barrels of shot had torn through the limb between the shoulder and elbow joints. He cut through Mal's shirt and a weak jet of arterial blood escaped. He pressed absorbent pads to the wound and tried to move the limb so he could replace Jayne's belt with a proper tourniquet. The weight of the arm caused it to slip off the side of the bed. Cruiser tried to catch it and his fingers slid into the stringy clots of flesh. He felt a jagged edge of broken bone and the unmistakable slipperiness of tendon. The arm was attached by a few strips of lacerated skin and nothing more.

Cruiser was a medic not a doctor and certainly not a surgeon.

'I can save his life or give you a two-armed corpse to bury.'

'Save his life,' said Kaylee.

'I need a steady supply of power and a not-on-fire ship would be a shiny place to work.' Kaylee and Jayne left the Med-Lab. A minute later the lights came on and stayed on. Freedom hummed to life as her engine started turning over.

Cruiser prepped a cauterising unit. It was an unfamiliar model but the theory was simple and he figured it out quickly. River stood staring at Mal. Without being told she replaced the blood-bag with a fresh one when it emptied.

Cruiser cut Mal's right arm from his body and cauterised the pointed stub. The smell of burning flesh filled the Med-Lab. To River it smelled hard, like slowly executed revenge.

* * *

Mal was running for his life. The ground was uneven and hilly. He bounded from the edge of one boulder to a tuft of yellowed grass his rifle held tightly across his chest. Around him Alliance bullets filled the air like a swarm of bees. He ran as fast as he could and threw himself forwards and into a crater just as a thumper exploded above him. There was a burgundy velvet lounger in the middle of the crater. Inara was lying on it. She was naked. Zoë seemed to be standing next to her. Except for her long military-boots, she too was naked. Mal stopped and cocked his head to the side.

'Room for one more?' he asked.

Zoë ran her hand over Inara's shoulder and down her arm to her hip.

'Only in your dreams sir.'

'Yup, guessed as much.'

Tracer-fire coloured the sky above the crater.

'Looks bad out there sir.' Zoë was crouched beside him dressed in full combat gear. Inara was gone. They were back in Serenity valley.

'You remember the fear Zoë?'

'One thing I could never make myself forget sir. Always more frightened of being hurt then getting dead though.'

'I think I got shot. Got myself hurt more than dead. I'm scared. Scared to find out what's left.'

'That's a natural concern sir, but hiding ain't your style.'

'I wish you were here with me Zoë.'

'I wish I could be there too, but I couldn't.'

'Nothing lasts forever.'

'As is often the case sir, you're mistaken; symbols endure.'

* * *

'He's going into cardiac arrest. All of you get clear.'

Cruiser reached for the metal paddles from the unit above the bed but could only reach for one at a time as his injured arm wouldn't rise above his shoulder. Kaylee grabbed the other and handed it to him. He pressed them to the top and side of Mal's chest and pumped down on the floor-pedal. Mal's body contracted violently. Cruiser watched the monitor. There was no change in the tracking blip.

'Again. Clear.'

Again Mal's back arched. His one remaining arm twitched as if in its death-throws. The single light travelled across the monitor without fluctuating. Kaylee fell back against the other bed and tumbled onto her knees. She blessed herself and started to pray. River stepped forwards. She reached out and gently took hold of one of Mal's blood-flecked earlobes between her finger and thumb. She closed her eyes and slowly massaged the soft piece of flesh.

The light on the monitor blipped then continued on its uninterrupted course.

'He's with Zoë.' She said. 'They are talking about the past. He misses her. He has so much love inside him for her. She is his brother.' A single tear escaped River's eye and ran along her nose and dropped onto the bed linen. 'He knows his arm is gone but he doesn't care because he already lost his right arm months ago when Zoë left Serenity.'

The monitor kicked in its stand and its screen went dead. Electrical smoke rose from the vents on the back of its shell.

'He's coming back…,' River retreated from the bed, '…and he's angry.'

* * *

'AAaaaaaRRrrGGhhhhHHHHHHH…THATSONOFABITCH!'

* * *

Mal sat forward on the bed. Cruiser steadied him. The entire crew was assembled in the room and holding their breath. He shifted his weight and his head rocked back with the pain. Cruiser hit him with another shot of Morphogene. He looked at his shoulder, at where his arm should have been and a sound started deep in his chest. It was a sound of pure anguish that turned into a howl of potent mourning that then transformed into a growl and grew to a roar of terrible fury. His eyes popped open shot through with burst capillaries and dilated from the pharmaceuticals. He bared his teeth and gasped for air.

'Sit-rep.' He croaked.

'We're breached cap'n, bad, too bad to fly. We're grounded. Not goin' no-where.'

'That bastard gone?'

'Took off an hour ago on a hard burn,' said Jayne.

Mal swung his legs off the bed and swayed for a few seconds. His face was buried in Cruiser's shoulder and his voice muffled.

'Where's Simon?'

Kaylee and Jayne shared looks.

'Simon's not here cap'n. He's on Iodo.'

'I spoke to him about two hours ago,' said Cruiser.

'Get him on the cortex now.'

'Can't cap'n. Com-room got taken out in the blast. They shot a rocket at Serenity.'

'Freedom Kaylee..' Mal dropped onto his feet and Cruiser supported his weight by wrapping his arm behind his head. 'We have to get to Simon. We have to get to him now.'

'Why? What's wrong? What's wrong with Simon?' Panic was rising in Kaylee's voice.

'That's where they're heading. They've got a cargo-bay full of meds. There's more in the warehouse on Iodo. Badger'll want that too before he's through with us. We loose that and we're done. Med-Express, us, everything; done; game over.'

'They're gonna kill Simon?'

'They are not going to kill Simon,' said River.

'We gotta get airborne now,' said Mal.

'But we can't. We can't break atmo with a hole in our side. Oh no… Oh no…Simon.'

'Get us airborne,' shouted Mal, 'That's an order Kaylee. Do it! Do it now!'

'Mal we'll be dead three minutes after we lift off.'

'We ain't goin' to need three minutes for what I got planned Jayne.

* * *

'You're insane.'

'Can't be done cap'n. Can't be done.'

'You're insane.' Repeated Jayne, 'You're goin' to get us all killed.'

Mal was seated in the co-pilots chair.

'Can be done,' he said, 'Will be done. Ain't that a fact little-one?'

'Affirmative captain.'

'What?' asked Cruiser, 'What are we doing? What are we talking about?'

'Jayne get yourself tooled up for maximum carnage. And get me something light and automatic. Something that will lash out like the tongue of a bitter spinster.'

'Talkin' 'bout jumping,' said Kaylee in response to Cruiser's question. 'Climbing to the edge then jumping space to Iodo's atmosphere.'

'But… but that's impossible. Mal they're right, it can't be done. Can't jump to somewhere you can see. That's too short a distance. We'll hit the core of the planet.'

'Isn't a pilot in the 'verse can make an atmo to atmo jump cap'n. Wash couldn't a done it. No one can. It's suicide.'

'Feeling suicidal little-one?'

In response River started the launch sequence.

'This is madness,' shouted Cruiser, 'Jayne stop them.'

'Sit yersel' down and strap in Cruiser. Kaylee help me seal up the ship. Don't no-one do nuthin' drastic 'til I get back.

'Something light and automatic Jayne.'

'Right Mal.'

Freedom started to rise, her nose lifted, Crystalmede's desert slipped down out of sight and stars filled the windows of the cockpit. River hit switches and pushed forward on the throttle. They began to accelerate. Mal grunted with pain as he was forced back in his seat. Warning lights began to blip on the panel above River's head. She silenced them. She already knew the hull was compromised. She increased the angle of their climb and opened the fuel lines. Freedom began to shake as their velocity increased. River fought with the controls to bring the broken ship under control.

'Nice and easy little-one. Draw it mild. We got time yet.'

River bit down on her lower lip and started warming up the gravity engine. There was a violent crashing sound as a part of the hull around the impact-point broke free and thundered along the outside of the ship. Freedom shuddered sickeningly. A second, louder crash filled the ship. On the panel in front of Mal a circuit flashed and started to smoke.

'Just left the port solar-panel behind. Compensate for the imbalance.'

River nodded once.

The clouds broke around them and the temperature in the ship instantly plunged.

Kaylee entered the cockpit.

'All sealed,' she said, 'engines are running sweet as we could hope for. Good to go.'

Mal nodded. Jayne placed a gun in his lap.

'Gielsen nine-hundred; fully automatic; sixty nine-mil rounds that'll kick in six seconds if you keep your finger down.' He sealed the cockpit behind them, the final door in the ship, and sat down on the floor with his back against a wall.

The entire crew sat in the tiny cockpit and watched the air outside the cockpit turn a deep, liquid black. A series of alarms began to shrill and the lighting automatically went to a flashing red emergency status. Freedom rattled like a nut in a tin.

River primed a final flow of fuel to the wing mounted Smith & Davis SD-2595 turbofan engines. They were moving at twice the speed of sound. From memory River tapped in the coordinates of Simon's warehouse on Iodo and Freedom flipped upside down and flicked her tail out. Their destination snapped into position in the centre of their field of view; a tiny glittering disc forty-six thousand klicks away.

A blue light on River's consol illuminated; they had entered the ionosphere.

River cut the flow to the turbo fans, rotated them one-hundred and eighty degrees and engaged the gravity drive. Incoming cosmic radiation reacted with Freedom's exhaust plasma and turned her wake gold.

'Think happy thoughts,' said River.

And they jumped.

* * *

Jayne had blacked out. He came to and realised his leg was on fire. He had had better awakenings.

Outside the windows the sky was burning like Freedom was being pressed against the surface of a sun as heat generated by friction between the atmosphere of Iodo and the hull of the ship caused oxygen to spontaneously ignite. Inside the cockpit a major earthquake was occurring. Jayne tried to beat out the flames on his leg that had come from a ruptured electrical line but a combination of the G-force from their descent and the shaking rendered his arm as useful as the one Mal had left down in the Med-Lab. He was in an excruciating amount of pain.

With a phenomenal effort he rolled onto his front and squashed his leg against the floor and extinguished the flames that way. Kaylee was lying beside him. She was under a large metal roof panel that had come away at some point when he had been out. She seemed to be unconscious. There was blood in her hair but it didn't seem to be running with any urgency. He reached out to grab her by the shoulder but a sudden roar pummelled the ship like a battering ram. He rose into the air and Freedom's nose began to rotate away from the direction of their descent. Jayne had the sickening sensation that she was about to go into a spin. "Not again" he thought, "Please Momma Cobb not again."

River was pressed back hard in the pilot's seat. Jayne could see that she still had the steering column in her right hand but her left hand had become detached from its contact with the control panel. She was struggling to reach forwards, straining to stretch towards a button. Her head was pushed down hard into her chest and her arm thrown sideways by another piece of the hull falling upwards. Immediately her hand was back hovering millimetres from the switch she needed to press to correct their direction.

Jayne was thrown diagonally up against the wall and then the floor came up to meet him. White lights danced in front of his eyes. He skidded to a halt hard against the co-pilots seat. Mal moved; he pressed another field-syringe of Morphogene against his chest. He was shouting against the deafening roar that surrounded them.

'RIVER… YOU… HAVE… TO…PULL…HER… NOSE… UP… NOW!'

They dropped out of Iodo's thermosphere and into the upper levels of the clouds. The concentrations of water vapour that ordinarily parted with the ease of cobwebs took on the consistency of concrete and battered against the base of the ship like a forest of logs going over a waterfall.

River was thrown forwards in her seat and hit the button that switched on the automated guidance correction system. A legion of ailerons that had not been detached by their entry began to dance across the surface of the ship. Immediately the quaking lessened. River switched over to the turbofan engines that were angled forwards and began to feed them fuel. Freedom's nose pitched upwards and the flames instantly began to decrease in intensity.

On the control board in front of him Mal could read their velocity and altitude. They were eighteen klicks from the ground and travelling at a rate that could more easily be represented as a percentage of the speed of light rather than in measured in mach.

"Do the sums little-one. Do the sums. Bring us down safe." he thought. He knew she could hear him.

From behind them all Cruiser suddenly started making some sounds.

'Is everyone okay? Kaylee!'

He unbuckled himself from his seat and fell to the ground beside Kaylee. He moved the panel from her. She moaned and held on to him weakly with one hand. He checked her over and took a risk that her neck wasn't broken and lifted her into his seat and strapped her in. Jayne was on his hands and knees between the two pilots' seats.

'Cruiser you need a gun?' he shouted.

Cruiser just shook his head and held up his fists. Jayne understood his message. He crawled closer and the two of them had a conversation lying on the floor of the cockpit.

'We get down in one piece we'll be storming in hard and fast. You be with us?'

'Yes.'

'Shiny. Let Mal go. He'll be making for that bastard captain 'f theirs and he's just crazy enough to walk through a wall 'f bullets and not get hit. History is not so kind to people standing behind him. And stay away from River. You might 'a noticed she has a way about her. Let her find her brother. You stay with me, understand? Watch my back. We'll go in low and nasty laying down suppressing fire. Clear a way for them, _Xi-bie gin_?'

'_Xi-bu gin _Jayne.'

Twelve klicks.

River had the turbofans rotated downwards and was feeding them fuel and using their downward force to slow their descent. It was all about balance now. She had to generate as much force as she could without tearing the engines off the side of the ship or slowing so quickly that everyone onboard was reduced to skinbags full of innard-soup; while still coming to a stop before they hit the ground where everyone would become burning skinbags full of innard-soup. She opened the fuel feed to the turbofans to twenty percent and grunted as the air was pushed out of her lungs by the increase in G-force.

Ten klicks.

She reckoned they could withstand more G's and went up to thirty percent. Her vision went momentarily black. She went up to forty percent.

Seven klicks.

On the screen in front of him Mal watched the altimeter and the velocimeter. Both were scrolling down but the altimeter was moving faster. There wasn't going to be enough time. They were going to hit ground. As if she had heard him River went up to fifty percent fuel flow. The engines protested and shook independently in their housings. For a second adrenalin surged through her body as she thought they were going to cut out. But they held steady and the velocimeter began to catch up.

Five klicks.

* * *

The Med-Express warehouse was located on the waters-edge of the east-side of a harbor in the industrial district of the city of Dundee. The harbor was one of many artificial ports that ran along the coast of the city like a zip. There was access to the front of the building for land vehicles. Air vehicles accessed the building via a circular pad projecting from the water some twenty-five meters from the rear of each building. The pad was connected to the warehouse by a wide walkway. Bon Saint-Chance and his crew exited the Oracle and with weapons drawn strolled along the walkway to the rear doors. Three klicks directly above their heads all four-hundred tonnes of the Firefly Freedom was coming down hot.

* * *

One klick.

Freedom exited the cloud cover and entered the air-space above the harbor district of Dundee at mach twelve streaming a flame half a klick long. People at work or shopping in markets, saw what they thought was a city-busting comet and had seconds to experience real fear before the sonic boom took out every window for twenty blocks.

River had one last option; the boost that could temporarily ramp up the force generated by the engines to one-hundred and twenty-five percent. It was one quarter more power than the manufacturers had designed the engines to withstand. It was a last resort, only to be used in emergency situations, such as when caught in the gravity-well of a gas-giant. River decided that their current situation constituted an emergency.

She spun the gravity drive up.

She fed all its power into the inertial dampeners.

She opened the fuel flow pumps to maximum.

Then, two-hundred meters above the harbor, she injected the boost accelerant.

A deep, perfectly spherical depression that spanned the width of the harbor appeared in the surface of the sea. The air around Freedom wobbled like a heat-haze. The turbofans revolved faster than they had ever been safely designed to do so and the arm in the tachometer on Mal's console was buried deep into the red region of the dial. Two needle-pointed cones of brilliant white plasma exited the engines. There was an intense but utterly silent flash of light that threw shadows as far as the curvature of the planet would allow and an expanding fireball, big enough to have given birth to a mythical phoenix filled the sky above Dundee like a miniature sun.

Her accelerant spent, Freedom fell out of the evaporating fireball like a pebble and plunged under the level of the water where she finally came to a stop.

Through the cockpit windows the crew found themselves looking at a wall of displaced green water that they couldn't see the top of.

Frantically River pulled back on the throttle and Freedom began to rise just as the water came rushing back in to fill the depression. They came level with the ground just as the salt-water met in the centre of the displacement and with a phenomenal _clap!_ sent a fountain of water high into the air. Freedom was consumed. The engines finally could take no more and quit producing anything more than a spinning whine.

But River had done her sums and had squeezed just enough power from the motors to lob the ship in an arc through the air and slam-dunk her down right on top of the Oracle that was positioned on the Med-Express pad. The Oracle's legs collapsed and Freedom pitched forwards then sank as something within the other ship buckled. She came to a rest.

They were down.

River's fingers creaked as she let go of the steering column and the throttle. In her hands she held the memory of the controls. She flexed in an effort to ease the cramped muscles. At some point during the descent she had bitten through her lip and blood had been shaken across her face. She unbuckled herself from the seat, stood and flicked the fringe from her eyes.

'We have them.' She hissed.

* * *

Bon Saint-Chance stood in Simon's second-floor office and looked out through the smashed windows, across the warehouse and along the walkway to his ship. And the Firefly that had landed on top of her. He couldn't believe what he had just seen. What he was looking at.

'How… ?' was all he could manage.

'I suspect that you have rather foolishly annoyed my little sister to a previously unknown degree," said Simon, "I recommend that you don't shoot yourself before she gets here. You wouldn't want to make her any angrier.'

* * *

Jayne hit a sequence of buttons on the console in front of Mal. The lower-front section of Freedom's head, her mouth, flew open and a long black rubbery tongue of inflating escape-chute descended to the surface of the walkway. The crew descended the stairs between the pilot's chairs and exited Freedom through the front door.

River was first to the ground and landed in a dead sprint. Jayne was next. Cruiser waited at the bottom of the ramp for Mal. He helped him up but Mal shouldered him away and began to walk in a straight line towards the warehouse with the Gielsen held out in front of him with the safety off.

Jayne was running to keep up with River.

'River… Stop!'

He detached four grenades from the bandolier belt across his chest and tossed them through the broken windows above the rear doors of the warehouse. He spread them out so they would do the most damage. River waited sword in one hand gun in the other.

The grenades exploded in timed succession.

The fourth detonation blew out the doors.

Jayne moved forwards and tossed two flash grenades in.

They popped. Cries could be heard from inside.

Jayne nodded at River and she slipped into the warehouse hugging the ground like a shadow. Cruiser caught up with Jayne at the doors. The big-man tossed him a satchel of grenades.

'Don't let anyone shoot that,' he recommended, 'could be bad.'

Jayne crept through the broken doorway with his rifle stock pressed tight against his shoulder. He lowered the weapon.

'Stand down Cruiser. It's all taken care of.'

Cruiser pushed in. It was dark inside and it took him a second to adjust to the light. When he did he almost wished he hadn't.

River was standing on a packing crate with the severed head of a black man in her hand. He had been bald and she held him by a length of projecting spine. More bodies littered the floor. At least two, a mechanic and a woman with piercings in her face had been caught by the grenades. Their bodies were blackened, but their throats had also been cut. There was a fourth body; this time the head had been split straight down the centre, all the way to the ribcage.

'How?' said Cruiser to Jayne, 'She was in here five seconds before us. It's not possible.'

Jayne pulled a grim face and shrugged; he spoke with what was for him an unusually quiet voice, 'She's got strange ways.' He dropped to one knee and began to go through the ginger-haired man's pockets. A bullet shot from above ripped through the flesh on the back of his shoulder. He roared with pain and rolled for cover.

River dropped the head and sped for the stairs that led up to Simon's office.

'STOP!' Mal shuffled through the warehouse.

'That bastard's mine.'

River stepped aside as Mal passed her on the stairs.

His eye-line drew level with the mezzanine floor. He could see two pairs of legs. He stepped over the broken glass and stepped through the door to Simon's office without having to open it first.

Saint-Chance was standing behind Simon one arm curled around his throat the second holding a gun to his temple.

'That's far enough. Another step and I'll kill him.'

Mal shot Simon in the right leg. Simon pulled an exquisite expression of shock, pain, anger and pure irritation as he fell to the ground.

Bon Saint-Chance froze; too shocked to move. He had got the draw on Mal Reynolds twice before. It wasn't going to happen a third time. Mal depressed the trigger and held it down for six seconds. For Saint-Chance that time would last an eternity.

Mal dropped the gun and flopped down onto his knees.

It was over.

'Simon… I realize that… just after shooting you… probably isn't the best time… but… think… I might have to request some time off.' If he said anything else Mal had no memory of it. The next thing he was aware of was waking up in a hospital bed more than a fortnight later and a nurse asking for his autograph. He quickly discovered that to his considerable surprise, deep-felt confusion and utter horror, Captain Mal Reynolds had become one of the most famous men in the system; and that Jayne was dating a glamour-model called Tyreza.

Med-Express was here to stay.

**The end of Chapter Four**

**Oh Come on! What does a man have to write to get a review 'round here?**


	5. Chapter 5

**Symbols of Freedom**

**Season Two: Episode One**

**Epilogue**

**One month later…**

Mal walked through Freedom in a real mood. This celebrity nonsense was really annoying his happiness. He understood Simon's desire to milk it for the good of the business but he had had enough. He took the first delivery job he could to get off Iodo and the Hell into the vacuum of space.

He walked through the corridor to the cockpit and took a second to read the new names above all the doors. He wondered whether Zoë had heard of them and their heroic pursuit of murderous evil-doers in a ship with a breached hull. He wondered what she made of it all.

He walked into the cockpit and sat in the co-pilot seat.

River turned from her position in the pilot's seat to look at him; she smiled. She was genuinely glad to see him. She had not found the spotlight to her liking either.

'So it's just us freaks then?'

River laughed and started the launch sequence. They rose gently through Iodo's sky in their repaired ship in comfortable silence until Mal let out an irritated moan.

'Damn hand itches.'

'Which hand?'

'Damn ghost one. Can feel it, just can't do damn about it.'

'Stretch it out to me.'

'What?'

'Stretch it out to me.'

In his mind Mal imagined stretching out his ghost-arm to River. She reached out and made a scratching motion in the air between them.

Mal closed his eyes as River scratched his imaginary itch. For a moment it was bliss. Then reality came rushing in.

'I'm a joke. I'm a gunslinger with no gorram gun arm.'

'No.' said River, 'You're not. You're something new. The 'verse has seen fit to reach down and choose you to be changed. You're not a joke, you're a contradiction. You're peace carrying a gun and violence with no hand to wield it all in one.'

River turned and looked across the cockpit and directly into Mal's eyes, 'You're a symbol.'

'Huh. I'm still intending to shoot Badger in the face the first opportunity I get.'

'Affirmative Captain.'

River piloted the Firefly-class interplanetary cargo-ship Freedom through the bruised ionosphere of Iodo and into the sparkling expanse of black above. She switched engines. The gravity belt circling Freedom's waist began to spin, her tail section glowed, gathering energy and then, with a burst of radiance like a righteous soul entering heaven they were gone, hurtling into an uncertain future. But for that moment, that single moment in time, the feeling of contentment that comes from finally finding yourself on the right path filled her captain and his crew.

**The End of 'Symbols of Freedom'**

**Cheers. Hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.**


End file.
